Moved to Melbourne

We've now moved in to a townhouse in Alphington which is north east of Melbourne. It's much smaller than our home in Sydney and even though we still have stuff in storage it has been a bit of a struggle to downsize enough to fit in.

The area is nice and I've enjoyed walking along the river which is nearby and through some lovely park land.

In the photo above you might be able to make out the yellow wire which is one leg of a dipole for 20m. It's a bit of a challenge to run cable to the antenna as the sliding glass windows seal tightly. Currently I have a balun inside and run the two legs of the dipole out through the window. It tunes up quite well but I'm sure the trees absorb quite a bit of the transmitted signal. WSPR works ok and I'm hearing stations around the world to some extent.

Unfortunately the power lines for the block attach to the corner of the room I'm using for my office so there's quite a lot of noise.

There's lots of FT8 activity visible but so far no contacts. I called CQ on PSK31 but nothing heard just yet.

Internet

The unit has Telstra cable NBN connected and I've arranged a transfer from Sydney. Even though I can see that the cable is active they want to deliver a new wireless router before we can use it. It's been mobile data for a few days but I plugged our Sydney router in and it works! This is handy as yesterday we were informed that delivery of the new router has been delayed beyond the promised date of next Tuesday.

Vale Tim Mills VK2ZTM

Sad news that ARNSW volunteer Tim Mills died this week. He's been a dedicated part of the NSW amateur radio community who I've seen every time I've been at Dural and often heard on the Sunday broadcast. Many years ago he was one of my first contacts when I put up a new antenna at Killarney Heights in Sydney.

Tim was always cheerful and helpful. He worked behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly. I didn't know him much beyond saying hello and chatting about the sausage sizzle and other trivia but I know he was a big part of the organisation.

It's my birthday today and it's a big one as I'm now eligible for a seniors card. Only a few of my friends have kicked on but I guess it's something that will become more frequent as the years pass.

Australian COVIDSafe app source code

The Australian Government has released the source code to the COVIDSafe app for both Android and iOS. I have downloaded the iOS code and have been reviewing it.

The source code in Swift looks modern and well written. There are few comments but names are well chosen. (I suspect many comments and attribution has been removed).

There has been some criticism about how the app needs to be running in the foreground on iOS to beacon and find other users but this is not a complaint about the app but rather a deliberate limitation that Apple enforces. iOS can respond to beacons without an app running but this is done at the operating system level and it looks like that capability will be added in the next update.

The app uses a CoreData database to store timestamped records of beacons it has detected along with their signal strength and transmit power which can be used to estimate distance.

Communication with the Amazon server API is protected with SSL and certificate pinning, so you shouldn't be able to intercept them.

I think it is great that the Australian Government and DTA have released the source. (Of course, there's no guarantee that the code in the app you install is the same as the source code we have seen but I feel more secure that it probably is).

If you haven't installed the app, please do, but note that when you are near a group of people you'll need to run the app and leave it in the foreground for the duration of your encounter.