RaspberryPi Wview Weather Station

I’ve had my RaspberryPi for a while now, but lacked the time or ability to have a proper play with it. That changed the other night when a cheap HDMI-VGA adaptor arrived in the mail to allow me to connect the Pi to an old LCD monitor i have. (i got strange looks using the…

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!!…

Sark-110 Antenna Analyser

In the PO Box the other day was a new toy. (this one is my birthday present to myself) 😀 I had been using a you kits FG-01 for a and while and that device worked well, BUT…  it lacked some functions and stopped at 60Mhz. I had read and seen a lot about the little…

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…

10 digit Grid References QF22NC…..

In the world of VHF/UHF contesting, an accurate grid reference location is important for distance based scoring. In the old days, 4 digits was more than enough, Melbourne metro is typically QF22, Sydney Metro is typically QF56. 6 digit locations are now the norm for contesting, my place falls under QF22NC. I was looking for…

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…