WIA Annual Conference

[Zebedee]

Well, I have to say I had an awesome time at the WIA conference this past weekend.

Great to see some good numbers making the trip from the other states and from talking to a few of them, there's a good contingent of people who either arrived early or are staying later so they can enjoy a bit of WA.

One of the highlights of the weekend were the TWO special event callsigns in use. We had VI103WIA used across the weekend, and I saw the VHF Group, Peel Amateur Radio Group and the Northern Corridor Radio Group all using that callsign at different points.

The second callsign was a surprise (to most, I knew about it a little earlier) and related to the guest speaker at the conference dinner. The speaker was Professor Lyn Beazley who is the Chief Scientist of Western Australia.

She gave a really interesting talk centred around "light" - starting off with some info on how they determine what colours animals can see, then moving on to energy from light (there's some ancient organisms called Stromatolites in the waters off the northern part of the state which have an entirely different type of chlorophyll to leafy plants, and they can photosynthesise from light up in the UV and blue part of the spectrum just like plants can, but also down in the red and infra-red part of the spectrum.) She also talked about how a small organisation here in Perth is developing glass which will let visible light through and therefore be a normal window, but will also act as a solar panel for light outside what we can see, and be able to produce electricity.

She then moved onto the Square Kilometre Array project which is aiming to see further into the universe than has ever been attempted before. It's a joint project between Australia and southern Africa and the data processing centre is being built right here in Perth.

At the end of the evening, the organisers invited her up to a high-frequency amateur (ham) radio station that had been set up in an adjoining conference room and asked if she'd like to have a go at talking on air. We'd organised for her to be issued with a special amateur licence and callsign for the evening - VI6PROF - and she had a go at talking on the radio and also listening to other amateurs using CW. We picked up stations in Russia and Japan from memory, there might have been some more as well.

It looked like Prof Beazley had a good night and she posted on Twitter several hours later about it:

https://twitter.com/ChiefSci_WA/status/ ... 8706501632

https://twitter.com/ChiefSci_WA/status/ ... 1980645377

https://twitter.com/ChiefSci_WA/status/ ... 8291244033