Sota Activation – VK5/SE-005 Mt Lofty

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…

EMDRC Club SOTA BBQ – VK3/VC-002 Mt Donna Buang

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,…

Sota Activation – VK3/VE-237 Huon Hill

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…

Sota Activation – VK3/VC-022 Mt Cowley 2014

Work took me back to western Victoria yesterday, with an early morning meeting in Warrnambool which meant a very early morning trip form Melbourne. Having finished all my tasks by mid-day, I took the opportunity to undertake some RF survey works taking the coast road back to Melbourne, looking at some site options for some…

Quick and Dirty Sota logging from the car!

A lot of my Sota chasing is from the car! It’s where most of my radio activity is based.. But that creates it’s own issues. How do you write down all the summit details and chaser info while doing 110km/hr on the freeway! I’ve missed a lot of chaser points through missing the logging bit.…

Sota Activation – VK3/VS-036 One Tree Hill

I’ve spent a couple of days recently in Ararat with work, a town in Western Victoria. We had been deploying a piece of telco equipment. By coincidence, Peter vk3zpf another active sota participant was assisting me with this work, though I’m sure he will claim I was being a manager and watching with a clipboard!!…

FT817 – W4RT 500Hz CW Filter!

As part of my efforts to make the FT817 work as well as it can on sota summits (yes, i tinker too much). I was looking at options for filters for the radio. While i have been spending money on this exercise of “pimping my radio”, i have been acquiring items cheap, second hand or…

FT817 Speech Compressor Install

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…

Sota Activation – VK3/VS-051 Mt Clay

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…