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.…
Named in honour of Andrew VK3ARR and his handbrake turns and Scandinavian flicks**. This is now known as handbrake turn hill. ** Andrew didn’t actually undertake such monouvers, just longed for a BDA Ford escort sideways. The EMDRC club field day site is around 5km from this previously unnamed summit, and with me being so…
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…
After our morning Activations to Box Ridge (SM-065) we headed back into Jindabyne for some supplies and lunch. The local Bakery at Jindabyne has really yummy Tandoori lamb pies, and i was keen to have one for lunch. The road back to the camp site passed another Sota Summit, VK2/SM-053, this is unnamed, at the…
This xmas holidays period has seen quite a bit of Sota activity in VK1/VK2 and VK3 areas. Many people have made the effort to operate portable on all kinds of summits. The sota rules allow you to only claim one summit a calendar year for activator points, and each summit can only be claimed every…
We weren’t so sure about this summit, we had left the camp site and headed into Jindabyne for some supplies before heading up the Charlotte Pass road for our yearly photo at the sign and a look over the Snowy River Valley. I’d suggested this was another easy sota summit on the way, looking at my…
It’s a nice easy walk beside the river. Then a short bit up the other side. I’d told the family. A couple of hours Easy. So we packed food and water (less for this trip) and drove up the road from the campsite to dead horse gap. I’d looked at my topo maps and determined…
As part of our family xmas holiday’s, we are camping in the Kosciuszko National Park, a family favourite xmas camping location, we stay in a bush camping spot on the Thredbo river just down from the ski resort town. We enjoy this part of the world visiting most xmas times. This year, having recently become…