QNews for June 1st 2025

Hi - it's the start of June already,. This is the QNEWS segment from the Darling Downs Radio Club for Sunday 1 June; I'm Secretary John VK4JPM, and we're working towards some good old fashioned end of financial year excitement. More about that in coming weeks.

Our two events coming up next weekend, with all the info that you need in the calendar entries at the club website.

* our bimonthly informal lunch is locked in for Sunday 8 June at the Highfields Tavern. There's a menu on our site so that you can see what's on offer: drop an RSVP to [email protected] so that we get an idea of numbers. If you're listening to this on the evening replay, it's either "we had a good time" or "oops!".

* on Monday 9 June we have our monthly club meeting, once again at the Toowoomba Library on Victoria Street from 1900m, and it's a packed program.

Hello, I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I’ve been thinking. Welcome, welcome, welcome, as a TV character used to say. Yes, welcome to Winter, with the shortest period of daylight coming in around three weeks. For those playing on the shortwave bands, I hope you have been enjoying the fluctuations in solar weather over the past week. As we reach the peak of this solar cycle, we can expect more of the strange conditions to persist. It is very eerie to turn on the rig and not hear any atmospheric noise at all. It is frustrating to experience blackouts and very low MUF, but it all adds to the mystique of amateur radio. Sometimes I have to consider what the necessary features of amateur radio are when confronted with an obvious lack of understanding of what I learned as basic information. It happened during the week when I explained what an antenna accessory was that had its photo posted to a group. The author wanted to know which was the antenna and which was the ground or counterpoise connection on the device. To this OT, it was obvious that it was a balun for connection between 50-ohm coax and 450-ohm ladder line. The response that I received from the author and some who followed the thread was that I must be wrong, as it had to be for the connection of an end-fed horizontal wire antenna, regardless of the DC resistance measurements that he had observed. Sadly, for me, it seems so many new amateurs are learning the least amount of information to pass an assessment without gaining an understanding of the subject. I know that this has been a criticism over many years of the US system where many authors produce cram manuals for each level of license. When we look at the international definition of amateur radio, part of its characteristics is that of self learning. Then the question becomes, just what are we learning? There are radio services that cater just for chatting, and the introduction to theory can get caught up in that. The amateur service would not be where it is today were it not for the citizen band in many countries. Then, is ham radio just a chat service with access to multiple bands and modes? As helpful as chat groups on the internet can be, it is my feeling that too many newly minted operators turn to this source rather than opening a book or doing a search for the correct information. It doesn’t take long to see errors posted in chat groups, and all too often, they remain uncorrected. Perhaps it is the need to school candidates in doing basic research and learning what good resources are. My small library is invaluable when I don’t want to compare sources online and just want to look up a chart or check a fact or two. We can be pleased that we have good training materials available for our Aussie training, and even older versions of the radio handbooks from the major English-speaking countries can be more reliable than a fact check on social media. I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and that's what I think. How about you?