QNews for May 4th 2025

Hi from the Darling Downs Radio Club - I’m Secretary, John VK4JPM. This coming weekend, there are two major club activities: Next Saturday, the 10th of May, we have our first annual club foxhunt and BBQ. Well, you have to start somewhere, and in the case of the DDRCI foxhunt, we're starting at Peacehaven Botanic Park on Kuhls Rd in Highfields. Start time of 1030 is when hounds depart for the chase, so you'd want to be in the car park maybe around 1000. Bruce VK4MQ is our hunt-master, and he's mapped out a finish point that will work for both newbies and experienced hands. You won't have to travel more than 15km from the start, and there's going to be plenty of support. If you go to the club website at ddrci.org.au and check the event invitation in the calendar, you'll find loads of hints, maps, DIY options, and just about everything you need except the final location of the fox.

Hello, I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I’ve been thinking. One of the changes to modern retailing is the growth of online retail. Yes, we still have the grocery store in the guise of the supermarket and the hardware store that sells lots of corner store items. We have the newer outlets from overseas that let you get groceries, hardware, musical instruments and surprises, all in good old bricks and mortar stores, as they say. We people who enjoy the electronic side of making things have seen a large drop-off of retail outlets, and some of us find it awkward or impossible to get to the nearest store, especially if you live in the regions. This brings me to the amateur radio tradition of having a pile of loot, a box of goodies or a rack of spares colloquially called the junk box. So it was that during the past week, I gathered some material that had been waiting for the opportunity to be attacked by heat and molten solder, and I set forth. I found that I had accumulated a stash of generic UHF plugs, PL259’s, and I had a nice run of coax to make some patch leads. Once the eyes were tuned to cutting and trimming the cable ends to the right length, came the thrill of melting solder. That task seemed to go not too badly for the first two ends until I picked up the meter leads to do the mandatory check for shorts or open circuits. That test was past, but what greeted me wasthat the centre pins on both connectors were now lopsided. I have made the discovery that most of this collection of plugs, probably sourced from an Asian vendor, did not have decent insulation but some brown, low melting point plastic substitute. Hopefully, I hadn’t lashed out too many pennies in buying this collection of rubbish in thinking I was getting the better quality insulation. A quick look at my nearest dedicated ham radio supplier showed a listing for proper plugs with Teflon insulation, and including postage, they are about $4:00 each. Thank heavens for the specials offered by this retailer. I suppose what is an object lesson from days of yore, is that items which can be salvaged and reused have a quality that is worth utilising. If you have ever wondered why there can be containers filled with electronic and electrical bric-a-brac at your HamFest, then I have just given the reason why. Buying from overseas and especially sourcing generic type items can be fraught with danger. Cable with insulation that breaks down with heating or voltage, fake semiconductors and RF connectors that don’t meet specs are some of the many issues you can read about with online shopping. There may be consumer law to protect purchasers in this country, but cheaper items are often a lottery when bought from overseas unless they are so-called A1 by reputation. We can say “let the buyer beware,” but there is no practical recourse when postage to and from countries like the USA can be multiple times the cost of the “bargain”, and the only beneficiary ends up being the local waste facility.

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