I had some work to do in Shepparton the other day, and on the way home, took my lunch break on a summit! Mt Major is a small bump east of Shepparton, its located on land that is owned by Melbourne University. The summit has a LOT of commercial tv, fm radio, mobile network and…
Im in the middle of painting my house, and its taking a very long time, my only aspiration in life, be rich enough to pay someone else to paint for me, as such most weekends recently have been spent sanding, prepping, painting, swearing, re sanding, re painting, as i work through the house, both inside…
The other week, the EMDRC club had a presentation on portable and lite HF antennas as well as some other ideas on portable operation. Len Steel vk3fb showed a nifty and cheap way of making some wire winders. The video of the presentation can be seen on YouTube at the bottom of this post. I…
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…
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.…
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…
Amateur Radio Operators are always looking for challenges. When the opportunity to launch a new sport arose, many operators were quick to participate. One amateur was recently quoted as saying “Simple point-to-point communications just didn’t do it for me any more. Sink-holes On-The-Air is an exciting new-low in Amateur Radio tradition that pushes the barriers…