Greetings from the Redcliffe & Districts Radio Club VK4RC. Robert Thomson VK4TFN here. REDFEST 25 "Adventures on HF" will be held on the 12th of April 2025. Our new venue will be The Deception Bay North State School, Old Bay Road, Deception Bay. We will raffle off a very nice ICOM IC-7300. Go to: www.redclifferadioclub.org.au for more information.

Hello and welcome to the weekly update from the Darling Downs Radio Club. I'm Secretary John VK4JPM. It's Groundhog Day, so I've checked with Punxatawnie Phil and we're either in for another four weeks of Queensland snow, or this segment will replay over and over again until the next Club meeting on Monday 10 February. At Darling Downs Radio Club we believe that being social is an important part of amateur radio, so a reminder about our bi-monthly informal lunch this coming Saturday, February 8th. We'll be meeting at Cafe Inferno in the Southern Hotel on Ruthven Street Toowoomba

Hello, I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I’ve been thinking. The technology that we use depends on what is generally called a commodity and which we pay for in increasingly high premiums, that of electricity. Mostly we are supplied by a reticulated service and the electrons are persuaded to travel the network in various ways that we call generation. We seem to have seen a total revolution as batteries were the first way of making electricity available, then came electromagnetic generation with various forms of energy providing the mechanical forces to rotate the magnetic fields and we have now revived the storage battery to facilitate use. Various uses of electricity have occurred over the last 3 centuries, and the latest fad that has swept the share market speculators off their feet has been that of artificial intelligence. AI was undergoing an ethical analysis as to the limits of its uses and the capacities it should be allowed to develop and then ChatGPT was launched on the world. Shares in the “chip” manufacturer, Nvidia, soared but not as high as the fictional cryptocurrencies. Then this past week a new player with reportedly fewer demands on computing power lobbed into view and the stock exchanges reeled. Before the release of the Chinese-developed AI app, there were questions as to whether the electricity grids could meet the high demand of the data centres which hurled the gazzillions of terabytes of data into the internet to make AI work. Then some cheeky environmentalist types added further to the debate by querying the amount of water that the data centres demanded to maintain suitably cool environments for the computers to make the magic. What we saw in the development of electricity as a necessary tool is the benefits of economies of scale. As more people were able to access electricity, the costs of providing it fell until somewhere in the last quarter century the Western world lost sight of the things that are useful and renamed them as commodities. Utilities such as water and electricity were processed and supplied at sustainable costs but when controls were relinquished, and plants were sold off the prices rose. With AI becoming more ubiquitous the processes of refining its use and recovering the costs involved should, like electricity did once, fall with the greater uptake. Perhaps the union of AI and quantum computing will provide the impetus for a dramatic renaissance and dynamism to the sciences and technology. Boffins have been debating whether the fictional devices of the TV “Star Trek” series such as matter transporters can not only be imagined but also constructed and used. Perhaps we are at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius after all and amateur radio will see a flowering that few of us can imagine. I’m Geoff Emery VK4ZPP and that’s what I think….how about you?