Sunday 19th was the Ballarat Ham radio clubs annual Hamfest!. I had walked past an item at the event last year and regretted it, so packed up the car and grabbed my big child Nathan, and we went for a daddy/son day out – road trip – Hamfest – Sota Activation!. Nathan had a busy…
Help!!!.. In the true spirit of this page, i installed a poorly built antenna on the weekend, and I don’t know why? I got the courage to cut my unicorn blood DX wire, and began the process of making a link dipole. Followed the guides form all the normal places, VK3ZPF and VK3PF and the Sotabeams Calculator among many. I built…
In my continued effort to achieve best BANG for BUCK sota signals, I’m looking at ways of improving the performance of the little FT817. I had toyed with a Hamshop.cz compressor however, in the field, reports of RF feedback and distortion occurred. I haven’t had time to understand why and try and improve the situation,…
I was cleaning up the other day and found my old Icom IC-706Mk2G radio. It had been in a box since semi retirement a while ago when I upgraded the radio in the car! It still gets used from time to time, camping and portable (non sota) and for vhf/uhf field days and contests, but…
From the Sota Australia Email list! “”1NAM and 1MBE, 2FAJG running QRP, 1DA, 5LA plus 3BQ These are a few of the SOTA Andrews”” With apologies to Rodgers, Hammerstein and all of Maria’s favourite things. **Stolen from Andrew, VK3ARR 🙂
Over the weekend, I passed 1000 chaser points and became a SOTA Shack Sloth! Thanks to everyone who has spent time on mountains to make this possible! Now to order the nice trophy!.
We headed into Adelaide today from the farm to explore the sights and I had a chance to activate a summit on my way into town. Mt Lofty VK5/SE-005 sits above Adelaide and has the towns Radio and TV transmitters. at the summit proper is a lookout/cafe/shop tourist place. We drove up into the carpark…
I had some time yesterday afternoon to tune up the wire i am using with the 1:1 Balun dipole project. I set myself up outside and ran out the dipole as I would deploy it for a SOTA activation. The antenna was too long as expected given how I had cut the wire! I started…
Arghhhhh.. ye scurvy dogs! the 2014 MWRS pirate day flagpole contest has been run and won. I didn’t have a HUGE amount of time this year to activate, but I did make it into the local park in the afternoon for a quick play to give out some numbers. But its always fun to set…
To Balun or Not to Balun, this is the question? Like Ford vs Holden, Canon vs Nikon or Yaesu vs Icom; the world is divided into two camps on how best to connect a resonate wire antenna to a bit of coax. Until now, my dipole had been direct connected. and this had worked as…