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IRTS Radio News Bulletin Sunday 02 October 2022


Club News

The East Leinster Amateur Radio Club (ELARC) continues the portable nature of the club station. They transmitted this week's news on 4m on 70.400Mhz FM from the Man O'War area, in North Co. Dublin. The roving ELARC crew appreciate reception reports for the portable EI0EL operations from around the country, helping to identify and assess suitable hilltops, and to also activate new SOTA locations. If you hear EI0EL and you are in the area you are more than welcome to drop by for chat and to checkout ELARC's portable setup.

Keith (EI5IN) sends a reminder that you're all very welcome to join the Shannon Basin Radio Club 80m SSB nets that restarted last Thursday. Tune in at 9 p.m. on the upper part of the 80m band. An exact frequency will be posted on the Shannon Basin Radio Club's facebook and twitter channel near the start. Everyone is welcome, especially newly licensed, portable, QRP stations.

Adrian (EI9HAB) writes: On Tuesday, the 4th of October, at 19:30, South Dublin Radio Club will host a talk by Tony (EI5EM) relating to QRP construction and operation. Tony’s talk was very well received at this year's GI-QRP convention, so this is a great opportunity for attendees to ask questions and get information from someone who is very experienced in this area. The talk will be held in the downstairs conference room of Ballyroan Community Centre. There is limited capacity at the venue. Any non-club members wishing to attend are asked to contact southdublinradioclub /at/ gmail.com . Alternatively, the talk will be live streamed via Zoom. Should you wish to join us via Zoom, please email us for login details.

It will be a busy week for Tony (EI5EM). He has been invited to give a talk on CW and Homebrewing at next weekend's RSGB Annual Convention in Milton Keynes. Tony's presentation will be on the Zoom platform, and is scheduled for noon on Saturday the 8th. It will also be streamed live on YouTube.

The October meeting of the Galway Radio Experimenters Club EI4GRC will take place Monday the 03 of October at 8.00 p.m. sharp at The Menlo Park Hotel, Terryland, Headford Road, Galway, eircode H91 E98N. There will also be virtual access to the meeting, please contact the Club Secretary by sending an email to secretary /at/ galwayradio.com for access details. The club website is www.galwayradio.com and anyone is welcome to come to our club nights or to contact the secretary for more information.


News from the ITU and IARU

Active radio ham and ARRL member Doreen T. Bogdan-Martin (KD2JTX) was elected Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the Union's meeting in Bucharest, Romania on Friday. After joining the ITU in 2014 as a policy analyst, she soon led the ITU's regulatory reform program, and since 2019 she is serving as the ITU Telecommunication Development Director. She will take office on the 1st of January 2023.

The IARU member-societies have voted to admit the Sudan Amateur Radio Union (SARU) as its newest member society. Founded on August 6, 2021, SARU has 54 licensed radio amateurs as members.


Contesting

UKEICC 2022-23

The UK and Ireland Contest Club (UKEICC) was formed in 2014 to promote the development of HF contesting in the UK and Ireland and to encourage newcomers into HF contesting. Because it is a friendly and courteous contest, it certainly has gaining in popularity and reach. The next UKEICC SSB 80m one-hour contest of the 2022-23 season takes on Wednesday, the 5th of October, and starts at 20:00 zulu. The Bonus stations G5GEI and EI5G will be active.

CQ DTC

The German Telegraph Contest(DTC) has been held annually since 1971. It takes place on Monday morning from 07:00 to 10:00 UTC on the 80m and 40m bands, the mode of operation of the competition is Morse Code (A1A). Only single OPs and SWLs can participate. At least one of the stations involved in a QSO must be in Germany. Each station may be worked once on each band. The telegraph signs must be picked up by ear. Any type of electronic reading or decoding device is against the competition rules and will result in disqualification. Each completed QSO counts as one point, but each QSO with one of the nine club stations of the organising clubs yields two points. The final score is the sum of the QSO points. German stations send RST and the abbreviated name of their district, in the form of the car license-plate prefixes, for example '599 od', or '579 hl', all stations outside Germany send RST only. SWL logs must contain both call-signs and at least one complete report per QSO. The organiser of the German Telegraph Contest is the Activity Group CW (AGCW). They also go on DXpeditions and have on-the-air CW activities throughout the year, all with an emphasis on manual morse and straight keys. Their web-site detailing all their events and activities is at www.agcw.de .


Comoros Islands

On Wednesday, the 5th of October, Dave EI9FBB and Jeremy EI5GM will rendezvous with the French DXpedition team (F6KOP) in Addis Ababa to travel onward to the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean to operate as D60AE. The team of 15 plans to set-up four HF stations for CW, SSB, RTTY, FT8, FT4, and a QO-100 satellite station for about ten days of operation, until the 17th of October. Dave and Jeremy will be listening out for EI call-signs, hoping to put many of them in the log. For more information check out the website, please note the spelling, at www.comores2022.wordpress.com .


Orbital News

Early Saturday morning, Firefly Aerospace succeeded in launching their Alpha rocket to Low Earth Orbit. One of the payloads was the PicoBus deployer, from a non-profit organisation called Libre Space. It carries five tiny payloads of its own. Those bantam "picosats" include two AMSAT-EA crafts, Genesis-L and Genesis-N. The pair provide FM voice, AFSK, FSK and CW repeaters, digitized voice FM and FSK telemetry. The new Spanish picosats will also demonstrate a pulsed-plasma thruster system for spacecraft propulsion.

Featuring numerous on-board sensors and a multi-spectral camera investigating land use, crop health, soil fertility and water quality assessment, Zimsat-1, Zimbabwe's first satellite, is also carrying an amateur radio APRS digipeater. This month Zimsat-1 is hitching a ride to the ISS, where the nano-satellite will be launched from the Japanese Kibo science module. A down-link on 435.375 MHz and the APRS frequency have been coordinated with AMSAT. APRS operation will be on 145.825MHz, the store and forward payload is using VHF, while the UHF telemetry and data down-link is using CW and 4k8 GMSK AX25.

There may be a launch of an Ukrainian amateur radio satellite into a 530 km sun-synchronous orbit this November. Students at the National Technical University of Ukraine have built an amateur radio CubeSat sporting solar sensors, GPS and Glonass receivers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, electromagnets and a flywheel for orientation and stabilisation in space. They will also run an experiment with the thermal regulation of the payload by using heat pipes. Satellite telemetry, a beacon and science payload data will be transmitting with 1 Watt each into 1/4 wave monopoles on 145,96 MHz with 1.2 kb/s AFSK, and on 436,60 MHz with 9k6 GMSK using AX25.


The Propagation Horoscope

Last Sunday the Mid-Cornwall Beacon and Repeater Group put three new CW and FT8 beacons on air. They are transmitting from IO70OJ in mid-Cornwall on 28.215 MHz, 21.050 MHz and 60.300 MHz, each using the call-sign GB3MCB. These, and many other already active beacons especially on the higher bands are worth observing, now that the 25th Solar Cycle is starting to deliver as promised. The past few days had the best HF DX conditions since the last solar cycle. The average daily sunspot number rose quickly throughout last week and is now well over 100. The average daily solar flux did not rise as sharply, reaching about 140 kilometers per second late on Saturday. This weekend sees G1 geomagnetic activity, an M5.8 class flare at 20:10 GMT on Saturday will add to the particle stream at the beginning of the week. More M-class flares are likely, but barring major blackouts the daytime MUF can be expected to rise well above 30 Mhz, not dropping much below 10 Mhz at night, with good to excellent conditions on Topband and all HF bands.

That is the news for this week. Items for inclusion in next week's radio news can be submitted by email to newsteam /at/ irts.ie for automatic forwarding to both the radio and printed news services. The deadline is Friday noon.

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