As part of my efforts to improve the performance of my sota station, I have been focusing on the low hanging fruit of changes to help improve performance, better antenna, swapping the internal speaker, better filtering, the latest change is the audio out of the microphone! I managed to find some time and confidence (i…
I had to head to Portland for some work earlier in the week, and threw the gear in the back of the car in case I had time for another quick activation. The drive is near enough 5hrs from home, and the proposed summit again had a site my employers gear is based on, so…
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…
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.…