Foundation Licence Course
2024-07-20 08:00 - 2024-07-21 17:00, 2024-09-14 08:00 - 2024-09-15 17:00 (Australia/Sydney) | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
Information on our courses can be found on https://www.crarc.org.au/education/

Monthly General Meeting
2024-07-24 20:00 - 21:30, 2025-03-26 20:00 - 21:30, 2025-04-23 20:00 - 21:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
On the 4th Wednesday of each month, CRARC hold a General Meeting for members and visitors. Doors open at 7:30pm for an 8pm start.
The main part of the meeting will be a presentation on a topic of interest and it’s also an opportunity for local Amateurs to get to know each other. More details for this meeting will be posted closer to the date.

Tech Night / Open Shack
2024-08-21 19:30 - 21:00, 2024-09-18 19:30 - 21:00, 2024-10-16 19:30 - 21:00 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
At this stage tech nights are intended to be held once a month (every third Wednesday of the month) with the potential to add the first Wednesday of the month if there is sufficient demand and capacity to support an additional night.
Tech Night is about members coming together informally to discuss subjects and projects relevant to AR and assist members in practical advice and assistance with technical issues that they may have. During the evening the Radio Room will be operational for all members to utilise.

Monthly General Meeting - – The beginning of 50 years of home computing
2024-08-28 20:00 - 21:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
On the 4th Wednesday of each month, CRARC hold a General Meeting for members and visitors. Doors open at 7:30pm for an 8pm start
CRARC Presentation August 2024 – The beginning of 50 years of home computing
Dale Hughes VK1DSH
In August 1974 Electronics Australia magazine published the first in a series of articles describing a computer that could be constructed at home. It was the first computer kit in an Australia and only missed being the first in the world by a couple of weeks. The computer was designed by Jamieson Rowe and was called EDUC-8. It was an 8-bit machine built using TTL logic chips alone i.e. no microprocessor, and general design of EDUC-8 was similar to the DEC PDP-8 minicomputers of the era. Surprisingly there is active group of people building recreations of the original design and a kit of parts is available.
The presentation will describe the reasons Jim Rowe designed and published the machine, the technical details of the machine, aspects of programing the machine, its construction and demonstrate a working EDUC-8.

BMSC “Horizon Apartments Narooma Forest Rally”
2024-08-30 10:00 - 2024-08-31 19:00 | ACT
BMSC “Horizon Apartments Narooma Forest Rally” – run in the forests around Narooma, Equipment loan and possibly some people assisting. POC VK1PL

Monthly General Meeting
2024-09-25 20:00 - 21:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
On the 4th Wednesday of each month, CRARC hold a General Meeting for members and visitors. Doors open at 7:30pm for an 8pm start.
Comtek Radio, a new VK online company run by VK6SJ and VK1KAZ will be providing a presentation at the September meeting on the Remote Radio Operations including the FlexRadio range of products. The Flex range of equipment is being marketed for easy incorporation into remote setups as well as for normal home use. Comtek Radio’s presentation outlines the FlexRadio range of equipment and provides a demonstration of multi operator, multi transmitter remote station using FlexRadio products. We will be show casing our demonstration system in Perth on the night via a Teams session.

Brookvale Horse Endurance Ride
2024-10-05 12:00 - 2024-10-06 19:00 | ACT
The Brookvale Horse Endurance event is currently scheduled for the 5th and 6th of October 2024. This years event is being held in the forests and private property to the North of Uriarra (off to the West of Mountain Creek Road) with horses and their riders completing rides of up to 80km in length. The primary WICEN participation is on the Sunday (6th October) with some setup activity occurring on the Saturday. This is a low key activity that allows you to get out into the bush in parts of our region that are not normally accessible to the average person and has proven to be a favourite activity for WICEN participants.

Monthly General Meeting
2024-10-23 08:00 - 17:00 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
On the 4th Wednesday of each month, CRARC hold a General Meeting for members and visitors. Doors open at 7:30pm for an 8pm start.
This months meeting will be held Wednesday 23rd October 2024 (yes, this week) in the club rooms with a presentation on Ionosondes being provided by Glen VK1XX. Glen has significant experience and expertise in this field having been heavily involved in a recent upgrade to a significant ionosonde system and will be able to answer probably any questions about the systems in use.
As it is getting a little warmer now, we hope to see a decent number of people attending what will no doubt be a very interesting topic.

Foundation Qualification Course
2024-11-09 08:00 - 2024-11-10 17:00, 2025-03-15 08:00 - 2025-03-16 17:00, 2025-05-17 08:00 - 2025-05-18 17:00 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia

Tech Night / Open Shack
2024-11-20 19:30 - 21:00, 2025-02-19 19:30 - 21:00, 2025-04-16 19:30 - 21:00 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
Tech Night is about members coming together informally to discuss subjects and projects relevant to AR and assist members in practical advice and assistance with technical issues that they may have. During the evening the Radio Room will be operational for all members to utilise.

Monthly General Meeting
2024-11-27 20:00 - 21:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
The November meeting is our last scheduled monthly general meeting for the year and as usual we are holding an end of year function to end out the year. Note the earlier commencement time of 7:00 pm.
The function will be the usual BBQ style dinner – they do however not run themselves and require a reasonable amount of effort to put together, so offers of assistance would be gladly received by your hard working committee – if you are able to assist, please email the committee.
For those who wish to offload some of the junk (umm, I mean the fine pieces of gear you wish to on-sell), please feel free to bring it along and offer it up to your club mates. We will have a small number of interesting items available for club members as we attempt to de-clutter the storeroom.

Tech Night / Open Shack
2025-01-15 19:30 - 21:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
Just a reminder that Wednesday 15th of January 2025 is our first Technight for the year and as normal the doors at Mt Mugga Scout Hall will be open at 1930hrs. Tea, Coffee and Biscuits will be available.
This weeks discussion theme will be Digital Communications such as Echolink, Allstar, DMR, DStar, IRLP etc. Many of us have heard about them and some of us use them but I am sure that most of us wouldn’t have a clue as to the services they provide.
So, if you are interested in learning more about them or if you can teach the rest of us, please come along for some practical sessions and discussions. We hope to gather enough information and knowledge to give a Presentation on the subject the following week at the General Meeting.

Monthly General Meeting
2025-01-22 20:00 - 21:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
On the 4th Wednesday of each month, CRARC hold a General Meeting for members and visitors. Doors open at 7:30pm for an 8pm start.
This meeting is a planning session that we have dubbed the “CRARC 2025” night where we ask members what they would like to see for the rest of the year and more importantly seek support from members to provide or assist in those presentations. Come along have a coffee or tea and chat with your fellow members whilst we plan what will be happening this year.

Memory Walk – Canberra
2025-02-23 06:00 - 13:00 | Commonwealth Park Carpark South, Commonwealth Park Carpark South, Canberra, ACT, 2600, Australia
The Canberra Memory Walk is a fundraising event run by Dementia Australia. WICEN ACT has been asked by WICEN VK2 to assist with communications for this years event – this is a low key activity for us essentially setting up a local area repeater, handing out/recovering radio gear to their volunteers and making sure the comms work for the event. This means we only need 2-3 people. A call for volunteers will go out shortly.

(Annual) Monthly General Meeting
2025-02-26 20:00 - 21:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
On the 4th Wednesday of each month, CRARC hold a General Meeting for members and visitors. Doors open at 7:30pm for an 8pm start.
This months meeting will be the Annual General Meeting – doors opening at 7:30 for an 8pm kickoff.

Tech Night / Open Shack
2025-03-19 19:30 - 21:00 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
A presentation (in the main hall on the screen) will be given on the DigiPi Project. This is a separate project from the Allstar project that Graeme gave a brief introduction on last tech night.

Like the Allstar project, it is built on Raspberry Pi hardware (and can be a low cost Pi Zero 2w). The DigiPi project provides data Modes ( for both Mobile and Base Radios (HF and VHF/UHF), as well Handy talkies using a variety of audio/ptt interfaces including USB Radios, so if you have been wanting to dip your toes into the data modes, such as APRS Digipeater, APRS Packet radio, APRS Webchat, JS8Call, FT8, SSTV, ARDOP, FLDigi, Winlink Email, and other packet modes.

Not just for home, but perfect for SOTAs/POTAs as it instantly reverts to a Hotspot (when the normal network is not available) that you can connect a tablet to, as almost everything runs in a Browser Window (that’s right FT8/JS8Call,APRS web chat).

Anyway, you can learn more at this tech-night, but if you have no interest, Graeme will be available in the normal Tech Night room, working on preparing radios and I am sure he would love a hand.

There will also be a demonstration of a working AllStar Node for those interested.

As always there will be Tea, Coffee and Biscuits.

Rally of Canberra 2025
2025-03-21 12:00 - 2025-03-23 20:00 | ACT
The Rally of Canberra for 2025 will be held in the forests around the ACT. This is the largest event that WICEN ACT supports and needs a large number of WICEN volunteers to provide the necessary assistance. The rally runs on the weekend of 21-23 March, but there will also be significant assistance needed in the weeks prior to setup a number of portable repeaters and other equipment as well as the week following to uninstall it all.
Phil VK1PL is still looking to pull back from the running of these events and is looking for several people to take on parts of this role. It does entail a reasonable amount of effort in the lead up to the event including attending a number of meetings with the event organisers to ensure that the communications side of the event is not an after thought. If you are interested in this, please reach out to Phil and discuss what is involved and what you feel you can bring to the party.

Tech Night / Open Shack
2025-05-21 18:30 - 20:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
Tech Night is about members coming together informally to discuss subjects and projects relevant to AR and assist members in practical advice and assistance with technical issues that they may have. During the evening the Radio Room will be operational for all members to utilise.
Please note the earlier start time of 6:30pm which is consistent with new timings also being trialed for the monthly general meetings.

Monthly General Meeting
2025-05-28 18:30 - 21:00 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
On the 4th Wednesday of each month, CRARC hold a General Meeting for members and visitors. We are starting a trial of an earlier start so that members can get home earlier and not be on the road heading home late at night. Doors open at 6:30pm for a start shortly thereafter.
This months topic will be a presentation by Bob VK1ED on Linux:
With the current Windows 10 End of Life, there are going to be a number of workstations / laptops that will be replaced. Yet, whilst this hardware struggled to keep up with a ridiculously bloated Windows, it runs extremely well under Linux. Amateurs are well known for reusing / repurposing equipment and probably more so with the End of Windows 10.

Has the Linux Desktop improved to be mainstream?
Discussion on which is the best Linux distribution for Ham Radio Apps
Whether to use a Prepared Distribution already packaged with useful apps or install the apps separately on your selected Distribution
Why is strength in numbers important?
What are the advantages for using Linux?
What is good easy to use Distro?
Show and tell of Demonstration of Linux Laptop
Are there any logging applications that are good for Linux
What backup options are available, especially if I keep my logs on there.?

Tech Night / Open Shack
2025-06-18 18:30 - 20:30 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
Technight is upon us again this Wednesday at the Mt Mugga Scout Hall at 1830hrs.
The subject for general discussion is Computer Aided Antenna Modelling. So if you are keen to attempt this activity, bring your laptop and we will supply some software that will possibly confuse you as much as it has us.
We believe that knowing how to use these programs, even at a basic level, will be of great benefit to most if not all Hams. Malcolm (VK1MAL) will be imparting his considerable knowledge whilst the rest of us will hopefully learn.
If there are any other members who have some knowledge on the subject please turn up and join in.
As it has been in the past, Pizza, Coffee, Tea and biscuits will be available.
All we ask is a donation of $5.00/head to cover the cost of the Pizzas.

Monthly General Meeting
2025-06-25 18:30 - 21:00 | Mt Mugga Scout Hall, 17 Astrolabe St, Red Hill, ACT, 2603, Australia
On the 4th Wednesday of each month, CRARC hold a General Meeting for members and visitors. Doors open at 6:30pm for a start shortly thereafter.
The main part of the meeting will be a presentation on a topic of interest and it’s also an opportunity for local Amateurs to get to know each other. More details for this meeting will be posted closer to the date.
