Q-News for September 27th 2026

``` Hi at whatever time you're listening to QNEWS: this is the edition for week commencing Sunday 27 September, and 2026 is fast running past. I'm John VK4JPM Secretary of the Darling Downs Radio Club with this update. In two weeks and one day it will be Monday 12th of October, the second Monday of the month and the date for our regular Club Meeting. The October topic is Mesh communications. A quick web check will tell you that Meshtastic and MeshCore both use LoRa radios for off-grid mesh messaging; but what does that actually mean, and how do the systems work. There's also a lot of discussion about Meshtastic vs Meshcore, almost like they are opposing NRL teams. At our next meeting, we're going to introduce the topic of Mesh in a way that's helpful, and give you some examples of what you can do with Mesh messaging. And our team of experts will show you how easy it is to start experimenting with Mesh and what practical outcomes you might get - plus it will be a good opportunity to review some of the underlying technology that supports Mesh. More information coming, and you can find all the detail for the meeting now in the calendar section of our website at ddrci.org.au 12 October at the Harristown location. JOTA/JOTI season is fast approaching, and the Darling Downs Radio Club is working with a number of Scouts and Guide groups around the region to support this well regarded gateway to the hobby of a thousand hobbies. Dave VK4JPS and Perry VK4PER are putting together a number of activities to be run over the period of 16-18 October, including a 40m station to talk to the relatively close and eastern seaboard contacts; and an FT8 station that will work the bands and try to demonstrate changing propagation throughout the day - using grid tracker for some visuals. We'll show how you can use a simple Arduino nano to decode CW and using a flashing LED to send a message. We'll also have a workbench to encourage hands on-learning, with a multimeter and voltage dividers to learn about ohms law in a practical way. Our aim is to not only show amateur radio at work, but to encourage the guides and scouts to learn from the experience. If you have any other great JOTA activities you can suggest email, us at education@ddrci.org.au and we'll see if we can add them to out agenda. Or if one of the activities we've described gets your interest, and you'd like to know how we plan to run it, email us and we'll let you know. Education@ddrci.org.au Last week's 52 Week ham challenge asked you to work an early shift. This week is "work a late shift" but once again the definition of "late" is left to you. My day typically ends around 0100 wherever I am, but lots of people find 1800 a bit late and are preparing for bed. The aim here is to pick a time you don't normally work the bands, and do something different. You never know who and what you might find. And two things we haven't mentioned for a while: Mastodon, which you've possibly never used and which is the underlying communications tool for the Challenge community; and all the challenges can be logged - there are points for completing each challenge. Looking at the leaderboard, you could easily work your way back through some of the activities and run up a score high enough to be noticed. If you're listening to the Sunday morning broadcast edition, the club 2m net follows this broadcast on VK4RDD and Echolink. We welcome stations calling in via the net, and it's great way to stay in touch. If you've never tried using Echolink, check out the website where you'll find a heap of information on how to get started and make it work. In particular, there's a button pointing to the website that shows you the status of the link and our repeater... that's fun to watch. Thanks for listening. I'm John VK4JPM, for the Darling Downs Radio Club. Until next week 73s and thanks for listening. ```