QNEWS for this week (261101)

QNEWS DDRCI 261101

Good morning, good evening, good grief, or whatever time you’re listening this week: it’s nice to have you join us. I’m John VK4JPM, and this contribution to QNEWS comes from the Darling Downs Radio club, where this week we feature the letters P, H and P. Hands up if you already knew that the acronym stands for “Personal Home Page”? Nope, didn’t see that one coming. The scary bit is that a bug that hid for 17 years was found by AI in a few days. There is a lesson there, although I’m not sure what – other than a heap of people who had never heard of PHP now know it’s… a challenge. I’ve pasted a link to a good profile on the problem in the text edition of this submission, and if you can’t find a link send me a note via .

Apropos, we knew that upgrading the club’s website would be a bit of a challenge for some very good technical reasons that I don’t need to cover here. Just enough to say that if you go to the site and find something that isn’t working as expected then please tell us. And an email to will get your comment passed to our IT department, as long as you promise that you’re not a windows scammer.

Coming up next weekend: Ham-e-Con takes place in Hobart from 6 November, and there’s still time to get tickets. Ham-e-Con is the inverse of your usual hamfest: very few tables and lots of technical sessions. This year the theme is Hack the Ether: Education, Ingenuity, Connection, and we’re contributing to the Hack The Future thread. If you make it to Hobart, please come and say “hi” in person. We always have time to catch up with listeners.

Our next club meeting is on Monday 9 November, the second Monday of the month, and our feature guest will be Justin VK7TW, fresh from a weekend of running Ham-e-Con. Justin will debrief a conference he recently attended, and expand on the topics of Software Defined Radio; STEM – science, technology, engineering, and maths; and Citizen Science – something that hams know about because we almost invented it. And because Justin is also a current member of the WIA (in addition to being a Past President) he’s going to encourage you to ask questions about what the WIA is doing in these areas… or any areas, for that matter.

The meeting details will be on the website, and yes the future will be Zoomed so if you can’t make it in person you can connect remotely. If you do make it in person there will be tea, coffee, timtams, and conviviality over at Harristown. Monday 9 November, and check out ddrci.org.au for the location and links.

The 52-week ham challenge got a boost this week, when the convenors expanded the list out to the end of the year – so if you check it out now, you’ll see that the final nine challenges have been added. This week you’re invited to find, identify and make sense of an unknown radio signal. This is where you get to learn that the waterfall thingy doesn’t actually spit liquid all over your ham bench. Who knows what you might find when you randomly tune around – maybe not even on the ham bands. Can you make sense of the woodpecker? Did you accidentally tune into aliens discussing a supermarket list. All part of the excitement. The 52 week ham challenge is at hamchallenge.org and we’re at week 44.

Reminder to all clubs: we’d love to help you get on-air with **your** news. If we can help, drop a line to
If you’d like help with getting or upgrading your licence, then an email to is a good start.

And if you’re looking to be a part of our club, either by joining or renewing, then the big red button on our website is your friend. Click that, and follow the steps.

If you have a contribution then you know where to find us: . If this is Sunday morning, then the Club Net follows at 1000 on VK4RDD and Echolink, and we’d love to hear from you. I’m John VK4JPM for the Darling Downs Radio Club and we’ll be back next week. Happy PHP!

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Renew your DDRCi membership: https://www.trybooking.com/DMSZB will take you directly to the form

PHP story link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/what-to-know-about-the-php-bug-affecting-70-of-worlds-websites/ar-AA2fOQuV