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…
The trouble with operating from a car is, modern cars with electronic systems can be RF noisy! The diesel D4D engine in my Prado 150 series is no exception. With many sources of noise on the HF bands. From throttle noise to electronic injector noise, and base car background noise. Operating on some parts of…
I decided we needed to get some more people interested in sota, a number of members of the Ham club I’m involved in (EMDRC) had mentioned they were interested in SOTA, and a number had even acquired some portable gear with the intent of operating portable and even activating some sota summits. With the weather getting nicer,…
When Chrisitne got her new truck (4wd) I was keen to install some HF radio gear into it, i realised a codan 9350 auto tune antenna would be a nice addition, I had previously used a terlin tapped whip, and while this was a good performer, it was a pain to change bands when mobile!…
The other day i had some work in Albury/Wodonga. This is a very long day, with near on 8hrs of driving, though I did manage to sneak in 45mins for lunch and a Sota activation on Huon Hill, on the edge of Wodonga. VK3/VE-237. Huon Hill has a road to the top, you enter through…