12 element yagi for 2m used at home in March 2011. The temporary operating location in the shed used in the JMMFD and in the QRP hours contests. Computer came in handy for checking the rules. The FT817 next to it was the radio used for the QRP contest, running 5 watts output into the 80m dipole. It is very small and quite light. The antennas at the Yass property, as set up for recent operating events, April 2011. The dish has a future role on a microwave band above 1296 MHz.

My SOTA adventures and project notebook. Trapped five band EFHW SOTA antenna. Touch Paddle for MTR 2. VK SOTA CW practice files. Welcome to my SOTA and project blog! Use the menus above to select pages of interest. The header photo was taken at Mt Loch during the activation on 10 July 2013. The background photo is from the top of Mt Tabletop during the 10 August 2013 activation.

I recently obtained a Yaesu VX-8DR, primarily for use on SOTA activations. The radio has the six metre band, which is a bonus as SOTA is presently running a six metre challenge. By David Fannin which uses an arduino to process the standard GPS messages from a UBlox GPS and convert them to the Yaesu protocol. It looked like a great place to start, although the end solution had to be reasonably compact.

Summits On The Air and other playgrounds. Mt Marulan and Towrang Range 9 Aug 2015. The summits chosen near Goulburn are around 100km from Canberra so well within RF range. It was an early start to get to the first one well before UTC rollover.

My adventures with Amateur Radio and Geocaching! My new Pathtag has finally arrived! June 24, 2015.

Big mountain, small voice, many ears. Last weekend was a contest double-bill with the Remembrance Day and Lighthouse contests. Receiver strip, now with replacement audio stage using a TDA7052. Instead of the prescribed LM380. 867MHz IF filter, SA612 product detector, TL072 op amp, 2N2222 BFO. With a 10MHz IF and 3MHz VFO, which sounds sweet.

The operating position on Briarty Hill with the kids in the background. Activated across 31 December 2013 and 1 January 2015. I tuned up on 40 metres and logged my first. Once the New Year arrived, I held my frequency and worked 10 SOTA stations straight in as many minutes. The following 30 minutes settled down to a comfortable pace with seven more S2S stations worked. When the New Year rolled over I worked a total of 29 contacts with 16 unique summits. As soon as the FT-817 was.