This is Allan VK4HIT with news from Ipswich and District Radio Club. Ron has been calling in the Ipswich morning net since July 1986. For Ron, it has been a labour of love and for the rest of us listening or taking part in the net, he has been a constant – the voice of reassurance in a world of change. Sadly, Monday, November 25 was the last time Ron made the regular call for stations owing to a change of home address which doesn’t permit a base station setup. VK4RG was first licensed in 1956 and he is hopeful his trusty handheld will enable him to call in occasionally. VK4RG, we salute you and thank you for your service to the club and amateur radio. Reporting from Ipswich this is Allan, VK4HIT.

I'm John VK4JPM Darling Downs Radio Club Secretary with the club update for Sunday 8th of December. Before I remind you about the tech meeting tomorrow night - yes, tomorrow night. John VK4JBE is coming up from Brisbane to give us all the good stuff about Software Defined Radios. If you're just catching up to the topic, check out the Wikipedia article online, because that's a good introduction to the introduction. All the info on the meeting is on the website at www.ddrci.org.au

Hello, I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I’ve been thinking. During the past week, the postman handed me the latest edition of Amateur Radio magazine and it prompted me to think about what we used to have. Once there was a state-based newsletter aptly called QTC. This was a great addition to the shack in that reminders of events were in tangible form rather than just committed to memory. When the weekly news went out on packet radio, it was an easy task to print it out and these days we are very likely to have a printer on our home network which can do the same job with the news bulletins. You see, QTC went into a column in AR magazine before it went SK. Largely club notes have been lost to the printed medium and this makes our broadcast news all the more important in getting the messages out to fellow amateur operators. This is especially true with the magazine now bi-monthly having gone from monthly to 11 issues a year and now every 2 months. I don’t know how many clubs are running nets these days as there isn’t a quickly accessible list for me to check. I know that not a lot can be heard from my location and without receiving reminders or newsletters I would bet that most of us are just as much in the dark as I am. So here we are engaged in a communications activity and we seem to be confounded by poor communications. I don’t know how many missives are sent via the WIA Memnet service but I receive advice of the release of the digital issue of the magazine so that amounts to only 1 every 2 months. Periodically the text edition of the national news drops off until I send a plea for help and that makes me wonder how effective our IT systems are working for the WIA. To place a little context on the subject, I live in a house with people not only getting older but also living with chronic health issues. There are many times that I think of things that I would like to see done by me or others but circumstances don’t give the luxury of acting on those thoughts. For me, getting updates in my email is a welcome piece of assistance as I don’t have to devote time to searching them out. It also provides a point of connection to the wider community in a way that is accessed at convenient times. You see these ways of sharing are important on a personal level as much as they support club activity and growth. Once it was the cartoonist’s jibe that you had to lick the tip of a pencil or bash the heck from a typewriter to get the news out. These days we can achieve things much more sedately and just as effectively with our mobile devices or shack computers. I look forward to getting your news in electronic or broadcast. I’m Geoff Emery VK4ZPP and that’s what I think….how about you?