Sota Activation – VK3/VW-022 Mt Arapiles 2015

We are visiting Chrsitines parents for easter, they live in horsham in western Victoria, i was able to sneak out for a couple of hours to play and make a Sota Activation. I asked the family if they wanted to come, but they all voted to stay home. Mt Arapiles is around 30km west of…

Broken 3D Printer FT817 Stand :(

The nifty 3D printed FT817 Stand I had made up at Glen Eira library last year was fantastic! it worked really well, i was even using it on sota summits to lift the radio up a little! Until I had it on a summit in the sun for too long, it got hot and soft…

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…

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/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…

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…