Earlier in the year, Icom released the IC-7300, an SDR based Ham Radio, it was the first of the big three commercial ham radio manufactures to provide an all in one desktop SDR based device. This caused a bit of a stir in the worldwide ham community, A lot of people were keen enough in…
We didn’t go away for the Xmas break this year to Thredbo as we normally do and that meant a much quieter SOTA period for us. I had suggested to Christine we do something for the new years day change over, but my kids weren’t as excited. We didn’t even see in the previous nights…
The other week, talk on the australian ham radio Facebook wall turned to kit radios and the Pixie QRP Kit. A number of options were shown and talked about, after a search and comparison, I chose to purchase this Versions of the kit from This eBay seller. with free postage it was around $8. The…
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…
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…
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…
As part of a short family holiday to Sydney and home via Canberra, I was able to fit in one activation. I had dropped the family off at Questacon early on good friday morning, the kids love this place, we spent a whole day at the science centre on wednesday, and they wanted to go back.…
My four year old son Toby is Volcano obsessed at the moment. We had talked about some old volcanic rocks you could see not far from melbourne, and he had a picture of them in a book we had gotten him on volcanoes, so, we promised him a trip to the “Organ Pipes National Park”…
Amateur Radio Operators are always looking for challenges. When the opportunity to launch a new sport arose, many operators were quick to participate. One amateur was recently quoted as saying “Simple point-to-point communications just didn’t do it for me any more. Sink-holes On-The-Air is an exciting new-low in Amateur Radio tradition that pushes the barriers…
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…