Branch 50 (Wellington) NZART – Known as the Wellington Amateur Radio Club
Our first regular meeting of 2022 was to have taken place on Tuesday 22 February at The Collective Hub, 1/33 Johnsonville Road, Johnsonville.
Given the Omicron outbreak it has been decided to cancel this meeting.
Richard ZL2FY, one of our Central Region counsellors was to have attended. Richard will be invited to attend a meeting later in the year.
Future meetings in March and April will shift to Zoom online meetings.
The Nano-VNA is a powerful tool for assessing the characteristics of all types of filters, including crystal bandpass filters.
At the first shed workshop of 2022, Mike ZL1AXG discussed the construction of multiple crystal filters for HF rigs. This included a 12 MHz crystal filter for the Simple SSB 80m rig he is constructing in modular form (and this reflected the fifth presentation on that transceiver construction).
He also revealed a further 12 MHz filter and 2 filters at 4MHz for other planned construction projects. In this workshop, Mike covered crystal selection, design options (including lattice filters in general and Cohn and QER filters) and the challenges of achieving a nice shape and a passband that doesn’t have too much ripple.
He also demonstrated a “universal jig” for use with the nano-VNA and discussed when things go wrong with filters (in this case an LPF, or rather the test set up).
Rather than have our own Branch 50 NZART BBQ this year, the committee decided to join with Branch 74 (Wellington VHF Group) and Branch 69 (Kapiti Branch) at their Combined Branches BBQ.
The Combined BBQ was held at QE2 Park, Paekakariki on Sat 29th Jan from 1200pm onwards. Mike ZL1AXG and Frank ZL2TTS attended the BBQ. There were 14 amateurs and XYLs in attendance.
Our Christmas Lunch was held at the Petone Working Men’s Club, 47 Udy St, Petone on 6 December at 12 noon. Around a dozen OMs and their XYLs attended.
The final club event for the year was for the Social Group get together on Tuesday 21 December. As usual we gathered at George ZL2AG’s QTH at 1330 hours to share what we had all been up to.