QNews for July 19th 2026
About this episode
John VK4JPM discusses recent events in amateur radio and upcoming community activities.
From Toowoomba, centre of the universe, comes the Darling Downs Radio Club's contribution to QNEWS for Sunday 19 July. I'm John VK4JPM, and I've just reconfirmed why it's a bad idea to eat chocolate before you record the news. Thanks to all the people who sent positive feedback after last week's piece in National News. We now know what caused the Telstra outage: a clock that went backwards to the wrong epoch, and then told all the downstream servers they were wrong. Even though things can't possibly fail with networks, they do. That's why being a well-prepared amateur radio operator is so important - we won't go out when a server spits the dummy. The club meeting last Monday with Di Main VK4DI was wonderful, and Di was her usual high energy self. She provided some really good tips for contesting, and if there's interest we plan to run a weekend workshop on contesting at a future date. Also in the not too distant future, but dates not set, we are going to schedule some upgrade assessments for Foundation to Standard and Standard to Advanced - plus we're always available to help Foundation applicants to get to their first rung on the ladder. For both of those, drop us a line to…
People in this episode
Host: John VK4JPM
Topics covered
- amateur radio
- network outages
- contest preparation
- community events
- emergency systems
Keywords
- amateur radio
- Telstra outage
- contest tips
- Ausalert test
- Darling Downs Radio Club
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Darling Downs Radio Club, Telstra
Places: Toowoomba
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