QNews for August 16th 2026

Ken Fuller VK4KF left us on 5th August aged 98 years. He met his wife Pat when she was still a teenager on the range west of Sydney. Ken worked in the Queensland Rail Workshops in Ipswich, and went on to be a draftsman while studying Engineering part time. He was part of the crew monitoring rocket launches at Woomera, before becoming Science advisor to Federal Ministers in Canberra. He and Pat enjoyed sailing and after retiring they spent some years on their yacht along the Queensland coast. There he discovered Amateur Radio and received his full call with help of Amateurs on the Sunshine Coast. He gave up sailing in his 90s and went into care recently. This restricted his Amateur activity. There will be a service for him at Saint Lukes church Wooloongabba on 21st August at 11 am. Vale Ken Fuller VK4KF SK It's 16 August on the Darling Downs and most other places in Queensland. I'm John VK4JPM Secretary of the Darling Downs Radio Club, and we're celebrating the last day of Ekka by wondering what we might have put into our high-value showbags. You know the deal with sample bags: for $25 you get three candy bars, a plastic toy, a puzzle, a pack of crisps, and a comic that's been out of date for years. We can do better than that: for the $3 hamfest price, our pack contains 20 resistors in a value you can't use, half an Elektor kit from a british supplier, a compact fluoro tube, and a three-year back issue of an electronics magazine with part two of a thing you want to build - and no way to get the other issues. And if none of that made sense, we can help you upgrade your electronics knowledge through club meetings, radio training and our regular updates. Drop a line to [email protected] and we'll help. Closer to home, we spent this month's club meeting looking at repeaters, and how they really work. Turned out that cavity filters and stacked folded dipoles are more of a black art than we thought, so the session was very well received, just like our updated repeater. Echolink and IRLP have been enabled on VK4RDD, and you can check those out now - the downloadable Echolink app will help you find the repeater pretty easily. VK4RDD also has some new idents, reminding users of the CTCSS access tone, and pointing to the website for further contact. It was great to see so many new faces at the meeting, and a lot of gear was sold at insane prices. Next month's club meeting will be offsite: on 14 September we're going to visit community radio station 4DDB in Toowoomba to see how broadcast audio works. Broadcasting and Amateur Radio share a lot of skills and background, and it's amazing how much fun you can have with both - sometimes even combining the two. From a radio studio you might not get as many distance records, but you could definitely get a few long playing records. There are many hams who have had careers in radio, and many people in radio and TV have become hams... in all senses of the word. The date again for the visit to Radio 4DDB: 14 September; if you can hear or read this you'll be welcome, and details will be appearing on the club website at ddrci.org.au Coming up soon on the website will be some feature articles, pointers to a some e-magazines that have been e-mailed to us, and the article by Warren VK4FJ describing how to clean back and replate a 100-year-old morse key. The club VK4RDD net is up following the callbacks, and we'd like to hear from stations who can help us test echolink. I'm John VK4JPM for the Darling Downs Radio Club. Until next week, thanks for listening.