News Brief for Sun 23 April 2023

Hello Club Members and Fellow Amateur Operators,
This is John, VK5RJ with this week’s news from the Adelaide Hills Amateur Radio Society.
The Special Meeting was held Thursday evening, prior to the monthly General Meeting and the issues as advertised were dealt with.  All issues were resolved and the motions moved and accepted as detailed in previous emails to members.
The Monthly General Meeting was held after that, and the usual business and reports from everybody were made.
A number of points to be noted are:
For anybody undertaking activities in the Clubs name wishing to be covered by the club insurance should that be required, the committee must be notified before the event.
Paul, VK5PH is going to generate a survey to ask the membership what activities and specialities they are interested in. This will be both hard copy on paper as well as electronically by email.
Geoff, VK5JB has managed to find a source of reasonably priced bumper stickers for  AHARS, and in the near future they should be available at the club meetings for around $3. Possibly later we may also look at a generic Amateur Radio sticker. Any ideas for a slogan…. “Amateur Radio, still works in Emergencies!”  ?????
We are also looking at the possibility of re-invigorating the Repeated sub-group so that current and future activities happening to the linked repeater network can be reported back the general community. This would hopefully have representation from all clubs in SA.
Secretary and Treasurers report for the month were accepted.
Reports from the Training, Presentations and Speakers, Repeaters and the Big Buy and Sell sub-committees given.
A question re access to the ARRL was answered in the affirmative as VK5JAK has recently got the details from VK5YX to enable access.
Graham Dicker gave an excellent presentation on Electrical Safety, and there was much very good advice contained in the presentation. If we take the advice and follow all the recommendations we should all be safe! There are also a number of recent changes to Australian Law which mean that a lot of the old tried and true methods of connecting the 240V power are now no longer legal.  Make sure you have the required insurance cover.
The night rounded out with excellent supper.
Also note that the Saturday Technical session for May, on the first Saturday of the month will be a practical hands-on workshop on how to use a NanoVNA to analyse the performance of an antenna, and how to interpret the graphs that it displays, and what they mean. There will be a number of units available for you to have a play with.  Should be very interesting.
Also, in June and August, John Dawes will be running some classes on “Learning about Radio” and “Writing for Radio”. More about this in future bulletins. These will be limited space events, so you will have to book a place when we get all the details sorted. These will be held as the Saturday Technical Sessions for June and August.
As always, if you have anything of interest, or any exciting news, please let me know so we can share things with all our members.
And that's all for now from me, so keep looking at the emails, and listening to the Sunday broadcast, and stay away from COVID and other nasty bugs.
Cheers & 73 from VK5RJ and AHARS for this week.