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…

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…

EARCHI End-Fed 40-6 build.

Back when I started Sota, i was looking for a quick and easy antenna for portable use, along the way other items have been built and obtained that have made this project not as critical. The project is a simple 9:1 Unun that creates a match for a random bit of wire, it still needs…

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…

Sota Activation – VK3/VC-002 Mt Donna Buang 2014

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…

Core Flute Wire Winders…

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…

A new Ham in the Family.

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…

FT817 Audio Speech Processor

  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…

Elecraft T1 ATU

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…