QNews For April 27th 2025 Q-News AR News From Queensland podcast

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QNews for April 27th 2025

2d ago 9:00

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Darling Downs Radio Club news. Coming up on 10 May we’re running our inaugural annual club Foxhunt and family day. The actual hunt will start at 1030 and will run no further than a 15 km radius from the starting location at Peacehaven Park in Highfields, just north of Toowoomba. The Fox frequency will be 145.650 kHz, and the hunt is going to be staged so that experienced hands and rank beginners can both have fun. Doesn’t matter where you are in the state; we’d love you to come and join us - we already know of a few distant households who will come to stay in Toowoomba overnight, and the aim is to be as social as possible.

The hunt will start from Peacehaven Botanic Park on Kuhls Road in Highfields and is also the location for the post-hunt BBQ. Tons of parking, easy access, wet-weather protection, and great family amenities. Our next club tech session is on Monday, 12 May, when Simon VK4TSC will join us from the Brisbane WICEN group to guide us on the WICEN state of mind, and talk about the Hip Pocket Challenge Horse enduro, which has been rescheduled for Southbrook on 28 June.

Hello, I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I’ve been thinking. A comment about the quality of the image on one of the free-to-air TV channels started me thinking about progress. Compare the sound reproduction of a portable cassette player to a digital machine, and you can appreciate the way things have improved. With television, the images that we get when archived material is shown are appalling compared to the images we saw on the screens in our living rooms 30 or more years ago. Just as the digital TV was a vast improvement over the old PAL services, the newer HD is another jump ahead in home entertainment. This brought me around to thinking about the radios that I have used in the past. Budgets being what they are on the domestic front, most of my rigs have been 2 nd hand, so already showing their ages by the time I got to use them. From hybrid to fully solid-state HF radios, there seems not to be much difference in performance. For someone who started listening on the large console receiver dominating the lounge room and then went through home-made and commercial simple sets, it was amazing at the time what the multiband and multimode brand-name transceiver could do. Still, as most of us will have experienced, these older rigs had their own characteristics which made them good, but at times finicky and annoying on reception. They are perfectly usable, but you have to tolerate overlapping signals and front-end overload, from time to time, as they represent the technology of the period of manufacture. More recently, I was able to purchase an Asian SDR as my introduction to the multicoloured scrolling display. What a great little rig that has yet to do duty out in the rig. It is versatile and every bit a good as the best shortwave rig that I have owned. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been fortunate to use a full-blown 100W SDR transceiver made by a major Japanese company. Before receiving this piece of kit, I watched several online videos and took note of what users and reviewers had to say. I must say that I have yet to put a signal on air, and I have to fight the electrical noise which envelopes this QTH, but the received signals and sensitivity just blow me away. I am using a shortened centre-loaded vertical antenna in a poor location, but pulling voices out of nothing is amazing. There can be no trace on the display, and the audio is readable. There can be close-by signals without heterodyning, and I have yet to find out how this unit handles a really close-by and strong signal. I suspect it will use the AGC to the best advantage and still provide a clean signal through the speaker. I am impressed with the improvements that digital technology is providing now, and I hope we all appreciate the engineering developments for our recreation.

I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and that's what I think. How about you?

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