Earlier today, my wife Christine successfully completed her Foundation license course and has become (when the paper work arrives, its been submitted) VK3FCEK! Well done Christine, now you too can operate when we go on those SOTA trips! ***its arrived. 3 weeks for the wia to process their paperwork and 4 days for the acma. The…
Another Project for the Raspberry Pi when I get a chance is to try WSPR using the box. To make sure this works properly, it is recommended you use a filter of some sort. I ended up with a simple 10MHz (30m) bandpass filter as a kit from kits and parts in the US. it took 2 weeks…
I blame Ben, VK2BEN for making me spend all my money, the other week, he shared with me a link to the below Speech Compressor designed to fit inside a Yaesu MH-31a8j microphone supplied with the FT817 radios. The ft817 has no built in speech compressor function, and this little PCB is designed to add…
Over the last weekend, the Moorabbin Ham radio club held their annual hamfest. I had just enough time to pop in for a quick look see. Overall, the event was similar to the ballarat hamfest I wore about last year. A mix of junk with the odd interesting item, some new gear from the usual suspects…
As part of a short family holiday to Sydney and home via Canberra, I was able to fit in one activation. I had dropped the family off at Questacon early on good friday morning, the kids love this place, we spent a whole day at the science centre on wednesday, and they wanted to go back.…
I have cable internet connected at home, I’m using the Optus hybrid fibre/coax network (HFC), recently I had some performance issues, the old modem had started to go a bit flakey and Optus came and swapped my faulty modem/router. Thats when the noise on HF started, s9 hash constatntly, mostly on 7MHz, but all over…
How times change… From a non member and rather vocal opponent, to getting your son’s image published in the magazine (all be it still paper) in 12 weeks.. Hows that for a turn around!
*** An update. I have only had the time for one sota activation since fitting the new speaker, it worked very well, I had my headphones in my bag, but didn’t need to use them as this new speaker worked very well, worth the small investment to swap this over. I was looking at the…
My four year old son Toby is Volcano obsessed at the moment. We had talked about some old volcanic rocks you could see not far from melbourne, and he had a picture of them in a book we had gotten him on volcanoes, so, we promised him a trip to the “Organ Pipes National Park”…
One observation of this Sota caper is. Many of the operators are named Andrew. Is it just a case of age/naming popularity of the 1960’s and 1970’s? Or some other weird universe / moon / crystal / alignment that has drawn so many Andrews to climb to the top of hills and call out as…