Monday, April 27, 2015

NGARA ANTENNA - IMPRESSIVE LOOKING ANTENNA

Hello and welcome back.... Love one of these in my backyard, called a Ngara Antenna.. Impressive




Photo courtesy of CSIRO

AMCA AND DEFENCE TO SHARE HF (SHORTWAVE)

Hello and welcome back.... Found this interesting.. Thanks to Radiocomms.com.au for the article

The ACMA and the Department of Defence will collaborate on an HF system

A fortuitous confluence of needs will see the Department of Defence and the ACMA collaborate on an HF system that will fulfil the needs of both agencies.
The ACMA, the Department of Defence and the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) have finalised an agreement that will let the ACMA use four HF receiver sites in mainland Australia that are part of the Defence High Frequency Communications System (DHFCS).
This access will enable the ACMA to put in place a new high frequency direction finding (HFDF) and monitoring system, while closing three of its current HF receiver sites.
For decades, the ACMA and its predecessor agencies have operated a high frequency radio DF system for the purpose of locating and identifying sources of interference. Receiver stations spread across the nation are used to triangulate in on such sources, whether domestic or overseas, whereupon the regulator takes steps to resolve the issue.
The ACMA was allocated $10.5m for a new HFDF system in the 2013-14 budget, but by sharing facilities with Defence it will be able to reduce that expenditure by around $2m.
Defence is upgrading its DHFCS as part of Project Nullarbor, which will be completed by Boeing Defence Australia in late 2016.
“I welcome this historic agreement between the Department of Defence, the Defence Materiel Organisation and the ACMA,” said  ACMA Chairman Chris Chapman.
“At a time when we are all operating under significant financial constraints, it is an example of how the public service can innovate and do things smarter, and work across traditional boundaries to improve outcomes and reduce costs,” he said.

A need for change

Faced with ageing technology and several sites that had become less than ideal, several years ago the ACMA decided it needed to undertake an upgrade process that would involve replacing equipment and possibly selecting new sites.
“We’d been conscious that we needed to do something with our HFDF for some time,” said Mark Loney, the ACMA’s executive manager of spectrum operations and services, who was assigned responsibility for the service in 2010. “There’d been some preliminary work done before then, but we were really getting to the point where we needed to do something. HF is a band that’s actually thriving despite the fact that in some ways it’s very old technology; it’s still heavily in use in all sorts of things from broadcasting to military, aviation and so on.”
The ACMA’s extant system was 20 years old and technicians were having to scour the internet looking for spare parts. There were also issues with the sites.
“We’ve got one site in Birkdale in Brisbane, which is now essentially surrounded by city. Now from a strictly technical point of view, it was still acceptable for us to use as a receive site for HF, but we’d had vandalism and some other problems,” said Loney. “We also weren’t convinced that technically it would be a good site for the next 20 years, so we wanted to move from there.”
The ACMA also has a receiver station on the Cox Peninsula near Darwin, a location which has been, and still is, used by other government agencies for radio equipment. In the 1990s it became subject to a native title claim, which is still unresolved. It’s also a very difficult site to access and service, being a half-day drive from Darwin. So the ACMA decided to move. “We were originally going to move onto Defence land at the Shoal Bay receiving station. Airservices have a facility there and we were going to sublet from them,” said Loney.
The third site, in Western Australia, is at Bullsbrook near RAAF Pearce. “We’re actually on Defence land there. We were going to stay there, that was fine, although the curve ball that turned up with that in the last year was that the WA government is about to put a whacking great highway through it,” said Loney.
“The Quoin Ridge site in Tasmania is good. It’s actually between Hobart and Hobart Airport; and despite the fact there’s an airport just down the hill, it’s actually in a very good receiving spot,” said Loney. “It meets certain ITU criteria for voice monitoring as well as DF. It’s one of the few, if not the only, HF receive sites in the Southern Hemisphere that has that rating or that meets that criteria. So we always wanted to keep Quoin Ridge.”



The ACMA's HFDF site at Quoin Ridge in Tasmania was upgraded at the end of 2014.

The ideal solution

“We came to the view that we needed to continue to have the DF capability and so we went and looked at ways in which we could provide or access that capability,” said Loney. “The obvious one was to keep doing what we were doing, which is to have our own system. Another was to look and see if there was somebody else in Australia who could do it. And Defence were the obvious people to talk to, so we went and talked to them. What they said to us at that time, 2010-11, was no, they didn’t have an HFDF capability and they had no plans to acquire one.”
So the ACMA worked up a proposal to government, calling for funding to replace its DF system with a new one. “We were ultimately successful in getting that,” said Loney. “We went to government and said, ‘We need to have the capability, we’ve looked at alternatives and there don’t appear to be any.’ So we asked for money to do it ourselves - we got $10.5m.”
That was in May 2013. The ACMA went out to market very shortly afterwards, calling for tenders for a new four-site system with receiving equipment. It was during the tender process that the agency had reason to consult with the DMO, only to realise that the DMO was in the middle of the Project Nullarbor upgrade of the DHFCS.
“When our technical guys talked with the DMO technical guys, it became obvious that they were essentially building an HF receive capability that could also be used for direction finding,” said Loney.
The DHFCS has four stations - Townsville, Wagga Wagga, Darwin and Exmouth - each with separate transmit and receive sites.
Access to this network would mean the ACMA could shut down Birkdale, Cox Peninsula and Bullsbrook and not have to worry about getting new mainland sites, while retaining the Quoin Ridge site, which underwent an upgrade in late 2014. “We’d have access to four receiver sites on mainland Australia, which would actually in some cases give us better result,” said Loney.
The ACMA began discussions with Defence about how all this could work and a little over a year later there was an MOU in place.
Defence is making some changes to the DHFCS to accommodate the ACMA’s requirements. This will be complete in about two years, which is when the agency will shut down its mainland sites.
Quoin Ridge has just been upgraded with equipment from UK company Roke. “The Roke system that we put in is a really nice piece of work. One of the things it does is give you a great circle line of bearing back to where the interfering signal is coming from,” said Loney. The advantage of the new system is that it provides the “ability to receive a signal, process it and display it in a way that assists the user”.

 Receiver equipment at Quoin Ridge.

What about Defence security considerations? “We’re partitioned from them. We have no visibility to what Defence is doing,” said Loney. “We can drive the receivers across the frequency range we need, which is 2-30 MHz. We can run two tasks simultaneously, and Defence has a capability to run a much larger number of tasks. We’ve essentially bought some capacity on their system, and they’ve put a ‘wall’ between us and what they’re doing.”

Complaints department

The ACMA responds to complaints from users who experience interference on their frequencies. An example is the ongoing challenge for the aviation industry posed by fishermen in Asia who buy land mobile radios, which may be front panel configurable and may have the whole band available to them, and who then go looking for quiet channels. They tend to find the aviation HF channels, which are clear most of the time. “Airservices Australia is a big customer of ours,” said Loney.
The ACMA also works with its counterparts offshore; in particular, Industry Canada, Ofcom in the UK and the FCC/NTIA in the USA. “And we work with other administrations in our region, although that’s less common because we’re the only administration that has a real HF capability,” said Loney.
“We operate on a regulator to regulator basis, so if we see a signal coming out of a particular country, we’ll contact our regulatory counterpart over there,” adds Loney. “Typically it’ll be resolved. Regulators cooperate on these sorts of things. Most people in the HF band are well behaved because of the propagation characteristics and because HF is often used for last-resort communications.”

LINKS

http://www.radiocomms.com.au/



Wednesday, April 15, 2015

INSANE HELICOPTER PILOT

Hello and welcome back.... Now this is impressive, looks like its filmed late 70s but such skill.
Flying a helicopter thru a golf course, sometime just millimeters from the ground.... Amazing

INSANE HELICOPTER PILOT



A comment from the video page = Pilot in this Film is Siegfried Hoffmann who died in a Crash with a BO-105 in 1989. Siegfried Hoffmann was also the Pilot in this Video (BO-105 The Flying Tiger) and the former MBB Test-Pilot.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

2 CHINOOK HELECOPTERS FLYING LOW IN THE UK

Hello and welcome back... Love this video.


What could be better, on the water with a stunning babe when 2 Chinook Helecopters scream overhead... Perfect.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

2 FM RADIO STATIONS FOR BLUE MOUNTAINS - 2LT & MOVE FM

Hello and welcome back.... 2 commercial radio stations are available for residents in the Blue Mountains.

They are 2LT and MOVE FM.

2LT is aimed at over 35s and MOVE FM is aimed at the 18-35 demographic.

Both stations are located in Lithgow

Power output is around 40W (east side) and is transmitted from the Wentworth Falls tower.


FREQUENCIES

2LT = 101.100 Mhz (FM)
                  900Khz (AM)

MOVE FM = 107.900 Mhz
                        99.500Mhz

I live in Springwood (about half way up) and was able to get 99.500Mhz on the UBCD396XT but not on the Alinco DJ-X3 using an outdoor antenna.
Seems the same with the other Blue Mountains radio 2BLU, sometimes have problems getting this station as well (sometimes on a cloudy day it comes in).. I think its where Springwood is located, maybe a bit of a hollow.. Umbrella effect even. (Straight over the top)

Someday's i can get Radio 2ST (Nowra) which is about 5? hours away... excellent


LINKS

http://www.2lt.com.au

https://www.facebook.com/radio2lt

http://www.movefm.com.au/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Move-FM/111989818852966

https://twitter.com/movefm


Sunday, March 22, 2015

LISMORE FREQUENCIES

Lismore is a subtropical town in northeastern New South Wales, Australia and the main population centre in the City of Lismore local government area; it is also a regional centre in the Northern Rivers region of the State.

FREQUENCIES

Buslines =  404.550, 414.000, 473.800

NBN =  461.19375

Northern Rivers Television = 855.750, 931.750                 

Rural Fire = GRN?
(also try)     73.950
                   160.225
                   413.475
                   413.775
                   415.0375
                   404.325
                   413.3125
                   414.175  
                   450.800
                   461.11875
                   460.200
                   460.300
                   460.350
                   460.650
                   853.15625
                   852.2875
                   852.1125
                   853.20625
                   928.0625

SES = GRN?
(also try) =  2.5645
                   2.5675
                   2.5705
                   2.5735
                   2.5765
                   3.7305
                   3.7335
                   3.7365
                   3.7445
                   4.5685
                   4.5775
                   5.8345
                   7.3315
                   9.3015
                 11.4365
                 14.7465
                119.100
                413.800
                414.150
                414.14375
                414.6875
                416.5125
                416.125
                451.025
                451.100
                460.525

Fire Brigade = GRN?
(also try)         852.1125
                      419.120

NSW Police (UHF Encrypted Digital?)
(also try)         78.3125
                       78.8125
                      78.1875
                      78.975
                     450.650
                     450.775
                    451.075
                    468.8625
                    468.9125
                    469.0875

NSW Ambulance = GRN?
(also try)          132.750
                        404.650
                        404.850
                        414.100
                        414.300
                        414.375
                        413.71875
                        462.750
                        462.8875
                        854.100

St John Ambulance =  404.075
                                  472.150
                                  472.200
                                  411.400
                                  412.100
                                  151.125
                                  462.850
                                  460.875
                                  507.950

NPWS =  163.100, 413.875, 460.800, 460.16875, 856.750,

Lismore Hospital =  474.800

Lismore Shopping Square =  463.550

Lismore Taxis =  489.450

Surf Life Savers =  489.225

VRA = 77.5750, 77.6125, 77.6875

LISMORE AIRPORT
                  REX =  135.550 (Regional Express)
                  Lismore Council = 124.200, 128.050
                  Airservices Aust =  239Khz
                                                120.300 (FIS) - Flight Info Service
                                                123.300 (Air Weapons Range)
                                                124.200 (MBZ)

Southern Cross University =  460.250, 450.750, 867.6875, 865.6875

Lismore Workers Club = 450.025,  509.575

Northern Communications =  472.325
                                             472.425
                                             472.625
                                             473.200
                                             485.225
                                             487.800
                                             486.425
                                             476.575
                                             507.5125
                                             505.500
                                             506.5125

Lismore Council = 77.8125
                             404.050
                             404.075
                             413.525
                             413.500
                             451.23125 
                             451.46875
                             460.625
                             460.73125
                             460.96875
                             474.925
                             485.850

Rous Council =  70.650, 163.050, 461.300, 461.73125, 461.94375 (Rous Water)

Hancock Farm =  163.250, 163.9125, 450.60625, 460.10625

Summerland Security Service = 473.300

Riverlands Drug & Alcohol Centre =  485.025

Gold Coast Hotline = 450.875, 460.375

Family Court =  519.850

KMart =  462.425

Forestry Corp = 414.050

Skyhigh Crane Services = 462.300

Transgrid =  42.750, 77.9125

Essential Energy =  413.69375
                             460.450
                             450.825
                             466.175
                             467.475
                             463.425
                             460.075
                             460.125
                             460.550
                             461.08125

Holcim Pty Ltd =168.0550

Biscom =  167.6625, 167.9625, 167.3625, 166.7625
                  
Wicen Group =  440.050

NIM FM = 102.300
2NCR = 92.900
Vision FM = 87.600
2LM = 100.900, 900Khz, 168.775
Planet Radio = 88.000



MAITLAND FREQUENCIES

Maitland is a city in the Lower Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia and the seat of Maitland City Council, situated on the Hunter River approximately 166 kilometres (103 mi) by road north of Sydney and 35 km (22 mi) north-west of Newcastle. It is on the New England Highway about 17 km (11 mi) from its start at Hexham


FREQUENCIES

The Frank Whiddon Masonic Home = 40.750 (Hostel?)

Rail NSW = 450.050 (Main Traffic Ch)
                    918.500
                    920.000
                    922.000
                    924.000
                    926.000

Intermodal Operations =  918.750
                                       920.750

NSW Police = (Encrypted Digital ? )
                             469.3125
                             468.7125
                                (old)
                              78.300
                              78.475
                              78.5625
                              78.675

VRA = 78.100, 78.4625, 467.350

RTA = GRN
           162.9375
           165.150

NSW Ambulance = GRN

NSW Fire Brigade = GRN

Rural Fire = GRN
                   RURAL FIRE PAGE

St John Ambulance =  472.200
                                   411.400
                                   412.100
                                   462.0375

SES = GRN

Maitland Council = 469.675

Maitland Hospital = 472.475

Port Stephens Amateur Radio Club =  439.700

Forestry NSW =  450.61875
                            450.66875
                            414.14375
                            413.66875

NPWS = 78.7875

Crest NSW  = 77.7875

KMart = 462.3625

Big W = 450.325, 458.075

Red & White Star Cabs = 487.375

Country Energy = 77.5625

Transgrid = 77.9375

Maitland Airport = CTAF - 126.700
                                           122.650
                              FIS - 124.800
                                        125.700 
                              Newcastle Aero Club = 119.100




Forgotten Something?... Email me at mickyb1970@hotmail.com and let me know.. Thanks