A flaw in the Kranker Knob upgrade for my FT817 was discovered soon after the knob was installed. The yaesu soft carry case for the FT817 neatly protects the radio, however the knob extension bar didn’t fit!, thankfully my wifey has a home/internet based sewing business making kids hats and other items, so i enlisted her…
My big child Nathan has developed a recent trait of unexpected and rather rapid onset motion sickness in the car when we travel on twisty roads. With that in mind, we set off to join the Morrabbin and District radio club members at Mt Dandenong for a mini SOTA combined activation and promotional event. The…
So. What do people think the best bang for buck 817 upgrade is?? With the dollar heading north again (if you believe the financial review 🙂 it might be time to order some bits from OS again. My current thinking is a Collins Mechanical filter of some Type/Style/Manufacturer. On my Sota activations. The most common…
My big child Nathan turned six this weekend, as a bit of a family tradition, we try and go camping for both kids birthdays. And for the last couple of years for the big child’s birthday we have visited Tidal River at Wilson’s Prom. Its a caravan park in the middle of Wilson’s prom, with…
Opportunistic.. Sometimes thats what you have to be with this sota caper, especially with a young family and limited time to goat. I had a pretty urgent overnight work trip to Warrnambool handed to me, and a quick look at sota goat showed me that I would be near at least 2 summits on my…
The Australia Day long weekend found me in Western Victoria. My wife grew up in Horsham and we were in town celebrating her fathers 80th birthday. (happy 80th Karl).. Not far from Horsham is a pretty famous rock climbing spot called Mt Arapiles, and a quick search showed me this was a sota summit. So.…
I can’t recommend you buy this product, Not yet anyway. It’s not an issue with the device, the build quality or the actual product operation. I cannot recommend you buy the product because of the poor purchasing experience. I wondered before my recent camping trip and first real try of QRP portable (non sota) if…
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…
I often joke I’ve programmed the morse keyer memory on my radio to ask “do you have a microphone” but… Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in the sun playing around with the ft817 and with my Dinkey morse key and got brave enough to put out some calls. *initially without much luck. But I videoed…
Digital modes on the radio are a bit of a Black art. In my quest to expand my radio options while camping. I discovered and purchased an 817-iPad interconnect cable and it arrived just before our trip. I’ll expand on that in another post, essentially it’s signalink type device for my iPhone/iPad. I haven’t really…