QNews for September 1st 2024

Q-News AR News from Queensland

Hi - I'm John, VK4JPM, Secretary of the Darling Downs Radio Club reminding you about our meetings, second Monday of each month at the Toowoomba library for a committee meeting, followed by a social and technical meeting on a special topic. On the second Saturday of even months, we meet for lunch and an in-person chinwag. The September tech and social meeting is at 1900 on Monday 9 September and will introduce you to how the TUYA system works, where you can get cheap hardware and introduce some clever devices you can use to make your hobby more interesting. I plan to set up a complete remote-controlled lighting and power-switching system. Details on the website: ddrci.org.au I'm John VK4JPM and look forward to meeting you at the session.

Hello, I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I’ve been thinking. This year, Spring didn’t just peek over the windowsill but it blustered in stealing part of Winter with above-average temperatures in the Sunshine State. Welcome to the blooming of all the various native plants that perfume the bushland and bring us the misery of hay fever. Welcome to the beginnings of all those lovely outdoor operating opportunities and the smell of campfires and insect repellent. I was a little surprised, a few days ago, whilst watching a video to have the presenter reference other video material on a particular antenna and state his presentation would just be about the use in the particular location with whatever band conditions were present that day. Why should I be surprised, you may ask? There seems to be a bevvy of ham radio influencers, many of whom derive income from their activities, who have created personalities to draw the viewer into their web. This is fair enough when the purpose is to simply entertain but so many of these people are contriving scenarios where they are promoting items which have been supplied by manufacturers, wholesalers or retailers to ostensibly provide unbiased, independent reviews but in fact if you stop and think they are giving a promotion of the product not a critique of the pros and cons of the item. What I find more frustrating is that you can do a search and come up with numerous presentations on the subject matter and find that many are just promotions and others are simply put downs without real reference to the operating conditions and band conditions at the time of shooting the video. Having contradictory information presented as factual, to my mind, is just misleading. It would seem that often the depth of knowledge of these video stars is not as good as it needs to be to make fair comparisons and comments. The misnaming of components is a put-off for me. A toroidal transformer is not an antenna but it may be part of an antenna system, for instance. So these are the reasons I felt pleased to have seen a presentation that didn’t try to be an audition for a broadcast reality TV show and ended up saying this is what I found today but you may find things different tomorrow. When we set out to learn about a subject, we look for facts and reports that we can rely upon. We don’t depend on “advertorials” and promotions with a discount code attached. What we need is enough information to build our knowledge in the light of experience and the Internet is a trap for the unwary. It isn’t simply the person phishing for your banking details or the seemingly honest vendor of dodgy equipment but also the publicity officers who are looking for the cents to mount into dollars at the expense of honest reporting. What I think is that we need to keep our wits about us online and be prepared to question things and cross-check with recognised reference material such as the notable handbooks produced by large AR bodies. I’m Geoff Emery VK4ZPP and that’s what I think….how about you?