Member - Richard VK3TXD
EMDRC BBQ 16th January 2010

I am a proud member of the EMDRC as well as a few others in fact!

This year, same as last year, we had a “social field day” at the club rooms where members met, talked, played radios and best of all ate free sausages in bread. I also took my portable roasting oven and cooked up some yummies underneath a rather pleasant shady tree. The most important things were the comfy chair and esky (cooler) full of cold things to drink.

The focus of the day was for members to meet, socialize and have a happy day out and it was a complete success. It was really good to meet people I’ve only spoken with before and to sit down and just chat. If you wanted a measure of success I could suggest the time people stayed to chat, the number of laughs had and the number of handshakes exchanged. If that were the “measure of a good day” then to steal someone else’s comment it was “sensational”.

We had a new amateur who said his license was just 4 days old join us and when he left about hour or two later we said “don’t be a stranger now” and hopefully he will discover how friendly we are and how active many of us are on the club repeater (VK3REC).

A hilight for me was meeting an “ex” member of the club who now lives overseas and just happened to be in the area (because his house is next to the club rooms). He made a contact using my FT-897D and used his British call sign “portable VK3″ to give the club station a point. It will look impressive in their log! He is a physics professor and we had a sadly short but for me extremely interesting conversation on such things as the CERN collider, bosons and some fundamental theories.  I could see the difficulty he had explaining the “tip of the iceberg” of some of these things to me. Thinking back to the conversation I remember the context of the discussion but quite frankly the details seem to elude me now (perhaps fundamental physics research is not my forte).

Another “winner” for the day was Haydens’ “Go Box”. People took a glance, looked away, and when the brain processed the information took a long hard look and said “wow”. It was quite simply…amazing. Hayden depolys for WICEN and for disaster communications events. He deployed last year for the Black Saturday fires for example. Hi box has an IC7000, IC440 (CB), IC2820, power panel, auto tuner, lighting suport, etc etc etc.Basically, he gets the box out of the boot of the car along with a large battery, connects an antenna and is operating in record time. I’ve not put up a pic here as quite frankly it needs its own blog entry and I’ll contact Hayden for his permission first. Stay tuned!

The BBQ was on the same weekend as the summer VHF/UHF field day so I took the opportunity to setup my FT-897D on another table along with yagis for 70cm and 2m on a short mast slipped over a steel post. A club diplexer completed the radio station and we then played making just a few contacts.

In the background but hardly visible is Daves red car. From it he has a club 6m mast on the top of which (not visible) was a 23cm yagi that he used to make contacts with. Excellent!

It has been rumoured that another club BBQ will be held in the near future. In that case “count me in”. If you are going to come to your first EMDRC BBQ then may I suggest, bring a comfy chair, a few cold drinks of your choice and be prepared to meet lots of interesting people and best of all have a lot of fun.

Well done EMDRC.

Richard VK3TXD