News Page 19
This page contains all the latest news about school amateur radio clubs. Please contact us to add your SARC news to this page. Send us a picture and description of your SARC activities. Remember to get parental permission to publish student photographs on this site and in our newsletters.
New and Updated Projects for 2025
We were very busy at the start of 2025 developing new projects and updating old projects, including:
- Updated AIS Receiver
- Updated Mini Satellite Antenna Rotator Mk2
- Updated Mini Satellite Antenna Rotator Mk1
- New Zip Chord Feed Line
- New Antenna Modelling
Updated AIS Receiver
Our very popular AIS Receiver project, with over 650 builders, was getting a little dated. It was originally distributed as a Raspberry Pi image, which worked well on RPi versions 0, 1, 2 and 3, but it did not work on the new version 4 hardware or the with Raspberry Pi Bookworm OS. We tried to get the original libraries working again, but in the end we had to write our own AIS Messenger application from scratch.
Updated Mini Satellite Antenna Rotator
In March 2024, updates to Windows 11 meant that our free DIY Mini Satellite Antenna Rotator project, with over 1800 builders, no longer worked with HAMLIB or Gpredict. The problem was with the original Arduino Pro Micro controller. So we changed it to an Arduino Nano and release Rotator7 software.
New Zip Chord Feed Line
In an effort to match our 40m Horizontal Loop antenna to our feed line, we thought we would experiment with parallel-conductor feed line instead of coaxial cable. Realising that we needed a low impedance, the use of twin-lead or zip line cable presented itself. Our Zip Cord Feed Line project was the result.
New Antenna Modelling
With recent poor propagation affecting our daily broadcasts on 7105kHz LSB, we started wondering if we could improve our antenna setup. So we stared modelling different antennas to see if they would be any better than our 40m Horizontal Loop antenna. We tried all the other different types of horizontal antennas that would fit on our property: Flat top dipoles, slopers, inverted V's and L's, end-feds, centre-fed and offset-centre feds, and even some vertical antennas as well. In the end we developed had 15 different antenna models, each using the same type of wire and ground conditions, all at the same height above ground. The results were quite illuminating, overturning some of our long-held beliefs and generally accepted "antenna-lore".
SARCNET Getting New Operators On The Air
From time to time we get donations of Amateur Radio equipment from extremely generous people who want to help us get youngsters on the air. We work hard to clean and repair the often disparate pieces of equipment and assemble it into a fully tested and operational station. The equipment is then provided to young, newly licenced operators needing a rig.
The following equipment was generously donated by our dear friend Glen, VK3GMC, sadly now sk. We were able to restore it to as-new condition and we proudly passed it on to a bright, young lad that we discovered on our daily 7105 net.
We first met James, VK3JFR, when he called in one day via the Internet to the Ballarat Amateur Radio Group's IC-7300 remote transceiver. We found out that James had just completed high school and was looking to save up for his own radio equipment. So we were very pleased to help him out.
The donated equipment includes an Icom IC-718 Transceiver, Kenwood PS-50 Power Supply, Emtron EAT-300A Antenna Tuner, Hi-Mound HK-707 Morse code key and a 40m/20m fan dipole of our own design.