Sota Activation – VK3/VT-060 Mt Oberon 2015

Last weekend, we took our annual family short holiday pilgrimage to Tidal River camp ground in Wilsons Promontory. Each year, we head to this lovely spot for a couple of days away to celebrate Nathan’s birthday. This year he was 7..   I always con the family into a quick Sota activation as part of…

HF Radio Club or SPOT GPS Position to APRS

One of the features my codan offers is GPS logging. The 4WD HF land mobile club HFRC I use will take those GPS positions and plot them on a map, on their system to show where you are and where you have been.   This commercial service is great, but it doesn’t interconnect with the…

3 weeks in the Snowy Mountains

Before Xmas we packed up the camper trailer and car and headed bush for a holiday/break. Our location of choice is the Thredbo Diggings campground in the kosciuszko national park. We left Melbourne and headed east, looking for a different path into the mountains, our new(isn) car, the Prado has really made it easy to explore different…

Exploring random wire antennas!

In an effort to better understand the performance of my ft817 and the ZM-2 ATU, I’ve been exploring different random length wire antennas while camping. I read an article posted on a sota forum about random wire lengths and how to choose an efficient length, this article talks about the importance of choosing a length…

Anderson Power Poles

Standardisation of power supply connectors is something I have recently been undertaking throughout the shack, car and my camper trailer. There is nothing worse than not having the right connector, having to make up some form of connector instead of just having that box work, and with the camper trailer, dealing with fiddly and flakey…

FT817ND – My New QRP Rig.

I have just acquired a second hand Yaesu FT817ND for portable operation, microwave radio driving and camping holidays and I also plan to start to participate in SOTA activations. More posts to come as I explore this nifty little radio and the Z-match ATU i acquired in the bundle, as well as some useful SOTA…

Flinders Rangers – Family Camping Holiday

It’s not all about radio’s here at VK3BQ!. We recently went on a Family holiday to the flinders rangers. (and while I did have radios with me, it was more about a relaxing holiday in a part of Australia I have not visited before). It was a wonderful relaxing trip to a beautiful part of…