50 members!

It's been a busy and amazing first week. We've reached our first 50 members, and the outreach and support has been overwhelming. We have had our media release published by QRZ.com and a bunch of positive emails and comments in response. We expect several other amateur radio news broadcast to share our message, so keep a listen out.

Members have already started helping out with the process of things like DMR talk groups, US call signs and more. We've had an update regarding our Australian call sign, it's passed through AMC and is now awaiting approval by ACMA. As the Australian process for getting call signs is so slow, I'm going to try and get special event call signs sorted out early for next years events. More news to come on this.

We've had some great ideas regarding our first contest. I won't share the details here until we've finalised them but I'm loving the creativity and minds of our members.

Our members have been sharing some of their builds and projects that they've been working on. There's some great projects being worked on like tower builds, loop antennas, air quality sensors and pager transmitters. It's great to see and I'm loving every bit of it.

From an administration point of view I've learnt that this space is ever so important, it just shows from some emails and comments I've received. Given the immaturity of some people in the amateur radio community any future forums we post our events or details on we'll ask that comments be disabled. While we'd like to have an open discussion around our group some of the comments we received were abusive, inappropriate, and uncivil.

I've had a few clubs reach out suggesting that we do presentations regarding inclusion and diversity at their meetings. This is a great idea and we'll certainly be getting something together. If you have experience in presenting these topics or your a club that would like to see this as part of one of your meetings reach out.

That’s all for now - stay safe
~ Michael [VK3FUR]