New Zealand's Premier Radio & Electronic Interest Group

Firstly to add weight to my previous story regarding the failure to publish meeting minutes for six months, upon reading information regarding the environment court hearing I immediately contacted Mike Newman. I asked Mike for the date of the hearing. Thankfully Mike had not left for the hearing and he supplied the information.

As members and readers of my web site know I am not shy putting my money, a small donation towards Mike's expenses and two cents worth forward to ensure my voice is heard. So it was off to Tauranga this morning for a very long day sitting in a court room in a collar and tie. Getting a shirt to button up around my no neck is not something I can say I like much.

Anyway the first part of the hearing went pretty well from my uneducated point of view. It was clear the judge had issues with some of the evidence provided by one council planning officer. The hearing went until around five thirty so the hearing is to continue tomorrow.

I will update this article after tomorrows hearing is completed and of course I will have much more to say about district councils and the steps ZL radio amateurs need to take to ensure all have a level playing field going forward.

Update 15th May: I am pleased to report that there has been a favorable outcome to the appeal to the environment court. Basically, once everything is finalized, radio amateurs covered by the Tauranga District Plan will be allowed one tower up to 20 meters as a permitted activity. The District Council now has 20 days to draft new rules and the plaintiff another 20 days to respond in agreement or state any points that may still be outstanding. There are many aspects to the ruling. My understanding is that an antenna of up to 13 meters by 14 meters is allowed on the tower or pole. There is also previsions for up to 6 supports up to 9 meters for something like a loop antenna.

I can not praise Mike Newman enough for an outstanding effort to bring this chapter to a favorable outcome. Also Brian Heywood for his role. Brian still has a little work to do to complete the process however there is no denying this ruling will reverberate throughout the amateur community. Outstanding effort gentlemen and I am sure all ZL Ham members will join me with a hearty thank you.

Continuing on with the District Plan theme, I called in at my council offices on my way home. I had a good talk with a council officer about the Hauraki District Plan. Although we are allowed a pole of 100mm up to 20 meters, lattice towers are confined to 11 meter in my rural residential location. I did not establish the height in town however it is either the same as rural or less, perhaps in the range 7 to 9 meters. Unfortunately I have been rather lax and am now kicking myself as the next review is in ten years however I am advises that the next update will be in two years. In that time I aim to ensure that my council conforms to the victories Mike and others have achieved in setting the standard.

I intend to devote a few pages on this web site to the subject. I am more than happy to help co-ordinate efforts. My goal is to achieve a standard that either conforms to or exceeds the standard due to be set by the new ruling. It is my understanding that three rulings have now been made. North Shore where they have a 15 meter limit and Wellington which has a limit close to the new precedent set by Tauranga at 20 meters. Personally I am happy with the middle ground that has been achieved by Mike's team on behalf of all. A range in the region of 15 to 20 meters is a good starting point. I think North Shore should be the exceptional case however 20 meters or better is the starting point that all should aim for in relation to the many other councils yet to be dealt with or not even on the radar. As Radio Amateur's we should be aiming higher. The ultimate goal being a set of standards created at the direction of central government to be adopted by local government. With ten year revision lives some may never see unfavorable rules removed or replaced given due consideration to age demographics.

20 m = 65.6167 '

Update 18th May: I have been told the hand book for local bodies states that there is no such thing as a precedent with regard to environment court rulings as each district has different requirements or needs. I do not accept this at all. I am pretty sure utility providers operate under a level playing field. Amateur radio operators have a right to expect the same level playing field throughout New Zealand.

Just another reason why I am not an NZART member.

Council minutes for last 5 meetings posted [11 MAY]

I have heard the excuse, minutes will not be published until they are ratified, which is a very poor excuse for the behavior we see indicated by the update on the NZART web page. I think a frightful admission. NZART minutes are such that they are a secret society. Members never get to see reports and the likes. Members are not normally aware of individual councilors views on subjects and minutes are not published for up to 6 months. I presume the last 5 meetings takes us back to December 2011.

NZART represents not just its members but all radio amateurs in New Zealand. This is not the first time the lack of published meeting minutes has been raised. From my recollection of the outcome, NZART council made an undertaking to regularly publish meeting minutes as soon as they were ratified. I think all radio amateurs should be very concerned about the lack of accountability.

Off to the REG sale again. That makes every year so far. Well done for putting the event on. Great attendance this year from buyers and sellers alike. Lots of familiar faces although many names escape me. I fronted up on the day, wallet in hand, asking for a table to put my development toys on. Cost, my sub. Hi Hi. I had no portable USB power so an old mother board and supply was used. This allowed me to fire up two boards.

There was a little interest in the boards capabilities. Pricing of course peaked interest. I tried pointing the keen ones at this site as I would like to get others interested. Particularly those with experience with single chip micro's. Pic's and HC08's are fine and very useful however there is a whole new world emerging that is readily available to all.

I was told by one around $45 was the minimum for one of those things that I can't spell or say that is aimed at the hobby robotics market and you certainly do not get a 320x240 color touch screen with that. So for around $43NZD landed here in ZL the STM32V is value for money. The same Chinese wholesale web site has many useful toys. Would you like relays with your order sir?

The next generation APRS tracker or ...., you fill in the blank, I have a few ideas of my own,  waiting to be developed. Of course there are Repeaters controllers and D Star crying out for add on bits that could easily be handled by a STM32V.

As is obvious, I run a few free banners on the ZL Ham web site. If you are interested the process is pretty simple. Grab a banner off the site to get the size or just take this from the image properties. Create your banner and send it to me with the link the banner takes users to.

This offer is only open to ZL Ham members and not for profit type advertising such as club events, promotions, sales, projects, etc., at my sole discretion.

I have noted a few traders selling electronic product on Trademe for more than retail prices or much more than you can buy the items over the Internet. In one instance an item was being sold for $28 plus $4.50 shipping. The same item can be purchased from China for $11.70USD ($13NZD) with free shipping to New Zealand. Last time I purchased items from China they arrived within a week.

Trademe is certainly not what it used to be as far as I am concerned. The daily emails I receive are full of the same commercial junk. Many of the commercial traders use saturation advertising to sell their product. I have always objected to this. I am sure those who receive the daily email from Trademe know what I mean. They list items with a day or two until they expire and list the maximum number of items allowed thereby always appearing in the daily email.

There are a few people who behave themselves and these are easy to spot. I am not going to name them but I am sure readers know who the real Hams selling Ham radio product are. There is one in Australia who advertises a lot of product but he does not venture into the realm of spam as I call it. In New Zealand there is only 3 or so who would qualify as regular sellers of Ham product who are Hams. The rest are items listed in the wrong category. An issue Trademe have never addressed.

Personally I would like to see more controls placed on the availability of Amateur Radio gear. These controls could be instituted on a voluntary basis if people were clued up enough. Unfortunately clues seem to be lacking on a national level here in ZL land. The half dozen classified advertisements in the back of Break In is a very poor effort.

So buyer beware. Search the Internet for comparative pricing. You may be surprised. US freight charges are sometimes ridiculous where as some of our other trading partners rates may not be so frightening, particularly South East Asia.

I am glad to say the issue with my neighbors trees has been resolved.
The branch stopping my TH5DX from turning has been cut off today along with a lot more.

In fact one could say to ground level as all the trees are to go. One is already gone.
Two others are simple enough to deal with and have already lost several branches.
The tree at the front is a little more difficult to fell.
It needs limbing and then the power disconnected before it can be dropped.

I am real glad he has acted now as I feared the approach of winter. 

Then there were two and then there were none. Click for full sized image.

After struggling with a display start up issue with my software for a while I finally got to the bottom of the problem leaving the unanswered question, why? It appears trying to initialize the display within the main routine, before FreeRTOS is started, yields random results. The result was that the display remained blank when first powered up. Resetting the micro worked fine. Removing the power and turning it back on immediately worked fine.

Initially, I though it must have something to do with a display initialization timing issue and chased this around for a long time. Finally I tried reinitializing the display, once the OS was running, from withing one of the RTOS tasks and it worked. Having established this fact, I simply moved the call to the display initializing routine to the Command task.

One issue this challenge highlighted is a lack of debug support. I can find very little on the Internet about hooking the Gnu Debugger into Eclipse. I found enough information when hooking OpenOCD into Eclipse and like the debug issue, it is near impossible to set these things up by reading the manual. There is just not enough information in the manuals to allow one to understand what is needed. If anyone reading this knows how to set up Gnu Debug for the STM32 micro within Eclipse I would appreciate a few tips to set me on my way.

The batteries in my UPS finally dried up and toasted themselves. The batteries date to 2005 and 2006 so they have lasted a little longer than expected. The UPS started to beep and shortly after shut down all together.

Two days later a courier dropped off two new batteries at $25 each plus $10 shipping.

I bought the APC UPS at the Franklin club action a few years ago for a fraction of its cost and it has not skipped a beat since being put into service here. At times the power at this QTH is not all that great and it is not unusual to see the lights flicker in a storm.

I have always undertaken regular search engine reputation checks over the years. Of primary concern are my company name and domain name. This juicy morsel showed up recently so I thought it worth a mention.

It appears that around March 2010 my domain was listed on the Black Hat SEO forum at the web site shown, in a post about spam traps.  Click on the image for full resolution.

Wiki Site.

In other news the wiki site has been taken down. It was unused, not being watched and vulnerable. As a result it was filled up with spam. 10 minutes with MyAdmin deleted the rubbish out of the data base and both old and new db's saved for reference. The same old gang operating out of the Soviet block, Israel, Turkey, Indonesia and other places at it again. Having the ear of the Google CEO I have made a suggestion based on my observation.