WIA Club Grant Scheme award to ARV for Melbourne digital ATV repeater.

An ambitious project to digitise the VK3RTV amateur television repeater that was established in 1977 to service Melbourne and Geelong, will soon see it on air using the DVB-T standard.

This is the 'terrestrial' version of the digital broadcasting standard and can be received on commonly used household Set Top Boxes and digital television sets.

Peter Cossins VK3BFG reports that experiments are being undertaken with the basic system on the bench, but linear amplifiers have been built to provide a reasonable level of output power for the coming live testing.

Funded by Amateur Radio Victoria which has spent $3,300 on the project so far, it received a welcome and timely funding boost this week from the WIA Club's Grants Scheme.

WIA President, Michael Owen VK3KI presented a $1,000 cheque to Peter VK3BFG during the Amateur Radio Victoria Annual General Meeting held on 19 May.

Michael told the meeting that the WIA's independent grants committee had recommended the grant in recognition of the project's innovation and promising benefits to the amateur radio community.

At the heart of the project are German made boards with the system to be configured to have three inputs and two channel output, making it the first of its kind in Australia.

More news about the live VK3RTV tests to be carried out from Mt Dandenong are expected soon. Later a full blown technical article will be submitted to the WIA journal Amateur Radio magazine.

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