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.

SOTA, Hiking, National Parks. VK3ZPF Android SOTA logger app. Finding time away from work and family to work on the app. Getting the main user interface to work across multiple devices.

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.

Mt McLeod trig and Ovens Valley. Four Summits on the AAWT, March 2015. I had notice that a number of summits sat on or near the Australian Alpine Walking Track. Lake Cobbler would make and excellent base camp for a number of day trips which would easily pi.

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

Ego loqui ad viros super montes. A quick trip up to Swan Hill to visit my parents in their new house meant driving up and down the Calder Highway. With the radios in the back, an urgent need to evacuate the bladder, and a SOTA summit right off the highway, Mt Alexander was activated in a very ad hoc manner on the way back. Work has been in progress to add Japan to SOTA. Overnight, that work went live! There are a total of 5,2.

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.