NZART Conference

NZART Conference

In the last four years since I was in New Zealand, some things have changed in the Ham Radio world. The national society is in a better financial state, and the hobby is once again starting to experiment with new modes. Back in 1999, there was almost no usage of APRS. Now this mode has close to 95% population coverage.

Back then my job was to publicize APRS – this time around it was to represent TAPR in an attempt to spurn interest in newer aspects of the hobby. Like everywhere the NZART is growing older. However because of the smaller ham population in general, the lack of younger members is somewhat magnified.

Wellington
What I need to explain here is that the national capital of Wellington, where the conference basically was, is one of the most wired capital cities in the world thanks to an unauthorized project by the IT department of the local city council. Back in the early 1990’s the IT manager started installing Ethernet cabling around the city at night on the poles used by the cities electric busses. Eventually the project became an official project and became a fibre-optic backbone.

The network is continuing to expand with about 20 wireless access points scattered around the city (www.cafenet.co.nz) allowing wireless access from a huge number of coffee shops in the city.

For internet access in Wellington and at the conference I purchased a pre-paid internet card from a local ISP. They provided a nationwide freecall number for only about $1 per hour. This was a bargain.

I did not realize that the CafeNet was so extensive when I bought that card. Whilst in Wellington I was able to access this network for $20 for 120 mBytes of traffic. They state that they hope to bring in 4 hours or 120 mBytes, but there is a lot more value from the per-mByte charge in my view.

In Wellington, my hotel room faced the wrong direction to maintain wireless signals without some help. The 8 dBi omni provided the required gain when positioned in a window, but only when I worked out which side of the hotel the wireless signal was coming from. The other thing that took some time to work out was that I needed to use DHCP… When I run the wireless card at home I normally use static addressing to make automated use of the my home access point a bit harder.

What was also great was that my cell-phone worked as soon as I turned it on in the country – thanks to the joys of GSM Global Roaming. I was always amazed when people rang me, thinking I was at home, and in fact I was in another country. I am just glad that I have not seen the phone bill yet.

In Wellington they had just in the last week unveiled a sculpture as part of an arts program – a sculpture that may be of interest to people who are interested in digital codes. I am sure there is a message there, and I suspect that it is actually in brail for the blind, but it is an example of binary codes in the real world.

VHF Group Meeting
On flying into the New Zealand capital of Wellington, I needed to present a talk to the local VHF group on the technology of 802.11b running at 2.4 GHz. As a catch phrase I called the talk ‘High Speed Packet Radio at 2.4 GHz for under $50 (US$30)’ ensuring some interest. Interest there was, with about 25 local members venturing out into the cold Wellington night.

One of the highlights of this presentation was showing the club that 2.4 GHz experimentation was not hard. In the talk I even built a 2.4 GHz antenna lab with an Access Point and NetStumbler.

At this meeting I made some very interesting people – who have some fantastic ideas for the use of GPS and APRS without the use of expensive equipment in their cars. It was fantastic – to see people actually doing experimenting in groups.

The Conference
The conference itself was over the Queens Birthday weekend about an hour north of Wellington. The conference was opened on the Saturday morning by the head of the New Zealand signals interception organization, with a talk about the history of signals intelligence – The unclassified version. After that lecture I was able to actually use an original ENIGMA machine as used by the Germans during WWII. In general though, this talk was a bit of a disappointment. Later I found out that we got a ‘recruitment’ talk.

Following this talk was the NZART annual meeting – which I did not attend… I had some talks to complete at this time. In the early afternoon once the AGM was over it was time for me to give my first talk.

This talk was a general interest on, with a 10 minute segment on TAPR, followed by a session about the radio in the Sydney Olympics. The choice of this talk was deliberate. It showed how Ham Radio was being used in the real world, and is making a difference. This, along with lots of colorful pictures inside the presentation meant that the many spouses would also be interested by the talk. All in all about 100 people turned up for this talk.

The TAPR presentation I gave will soon be available on the TAPR www site – I just need to find time to finish it.

Sunday morning I gave what was probably the most important one of all – one that I started writing at the 2002 DCC in Denver, Co. The title of this talk was ‘Bazaar Ham Publicity’ – or how to publicize the hobby using the bazaar approach. It was rather disappointing that only about 10-15 people turned up to this talk. I can say that without a doubt that those that did turn up were challenged to change the hobby, and have started to think about what the perceptions about ham radio are, and how to counter them.

Personally I was rather concerned about this talk – It is not one that I would call polished. I was asked about a week before the conference for a talk that could fit a timeslot, and that was what I came up with – and my biggest concern was that it would only last 10 minutes. In the end the talk lasted 50 minutes, and the discussion went on much longer. People were still talking about the issues at breakfast the next day – something that is not really common for a lot of presentations.

The universal view was that this talk should have been given to EVERY ham at the conference. Some people were talking about flying me to a conference over the Easter long weekend solely to give this talk.

Sunday afternoon it was time for a talk on ‘High Speed Packet Radio’ just like the earlier talk in Wellington. This went down really well, and as always the discussion came back to the regulatory environment. I found it really hard to tell these people that they have effectively lost the primary allocation in 2.4 GHz, and needed to fight to keep secondary status.

One thing I was able to suggest was that they start looking at moving their ‘National System’ from 70cm to 2.4 GHz. The National System covers most of the country and really is an amazing engineering effort giving most of the country access to a linked repeater system. By moving to a digital 2.4 GHz backbone they could leverage the sort of applications only available with a country-wide data network.

Conclusion

Visiting New Zealand for the conference was no holiday for me, but it was really enjoyable. Many of the contacts that I have made over there now know that there is an international community out there doing things, and that they can assist. Just because it is isolated does not mean that the country is not producing some real innovations.

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