Submitted by VK2YJS on

WICEN NSW is a communications support squad of the NSW Volunteer Rescue Association.

The group was recently presented with a Certificate of Appreciation by the NSW RFS - Hawkesbury District for the contributions of its radio operators and Incident Management Team at the NSW RFS Hawkesbury Fire Control Centre. This included assisting in coordinating the response to the Gosper Mountain fire during the 2019-20 bushfire season.

WICEN and the St. George Amateur Radio Society are jointly conducting a test of a 70cm FM repeater at Mt. Bindo, on the Great Dividing Range. VK2RAH is on 439.875 MHz, with the standard negative 5.0 MHz offset. No CTCSS tone is required or sent.
Please give it a go, and let callback@sgars.org know how it went.

A remote training exercise will be conducted on January 9th and 10th, 2021. This will be conducted in small physically distributed teams, and include practising field operations.

Members have been experimenting with WINLINK and JS8CALL to pass text messages on Monday evenings, supported by a Google Meeting.

WICEN has a weekly net, each Sunday evening. The main net is at 1800, and a secondary digital voice check-in net at 1830. Today's uses the Chatswood 2m repeater, 147.150; followed by the (non-Amateur) Kurrajong VHF High-band repeater -R52 TAC 7.

Members are also encouraged to take advantage of the free courses offered by OEM at: https://www.emtraining.nsw.gov.au/

WICEN hopes to be at the CCARC Field Day at Wyong on February 28th, 2021.

Members are asked to regularly use their vrarescue.org email address. As of January 1st 2021 all WICEN emails will only be sent to the member's VRA email address.

For Facebook users, there is an official WICEN NSW page; and an informal national WICEN group.

WICEN ACT is part of the Canberra Region ARC. "Read all about it" at: http://www.crarc.org.au

WICEN Victoria's weekly net is Tuesdays at 8:30 pm, on 3.6 MHz. Their website is: http://vic.wicen.org.au

Submitted by Julian Sortland VK2YJS, on behalf of the WICEN State Management Committee.