Work had me in ballarat early friday morning the other week for a number of tasks, with a busy day of meetings then conference calls and other activities, however, i had some time between the calls and needed to NOT be driving while they were underway so i decided to get in a couple of…
Coverage prediction software is nifty and handy, the internet and powerful computers have made the availability of predicting coverage footprints for transmitters and the visible horizon from any location on the globe really easy. A number of simple software packages that let you predict these items are Hey Whats That http://www.heywhatsthat.com/ and Radio Mobile Online http://www.cplus.org/rmw/rmonline.html. I’ve written…
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…
The inspiration to purchase a RaspberryPi originally came from reading an article about turning it into a simple HF WSPR beacon. The device will output around 10 milliwatts directly from the GPIO4 pin and once connected to antenna will transmit away!. The first step was to build a simple band pass filter, i choose 30m/10Mhz…
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…
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.…
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!!…
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…
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…
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…