I have finally figured out all the bits for running APRS for tracking to and from my activations, worked well for my last activation of Webb's Ridge. That's a bit of a slower drive up via Blue Range Rd out in the brindies, good fun if a bit chilly towards the end!
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I'd decided to try and drive the triton up Mt Pinnibar while camping with the family at Geehi, 33km past Thredbo on the Apline Way. Geehi's a lovely spot, and I recommend it for camping!
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I'd planned a camping trip a few months ago with some friends at Geehi in the snowy mountains, a 45 minute drive, about 35kms past Thredbo on the Apline Way. So, thinking about it a bit more, I decided to see if there are any close by SOTA peaks, lo and behold, there are two, Mt Youngall a 10 pointer, and Tyrell's Ridge, 4 points and not previously activated!
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Another SOTA activation for me, having come out of a flu and some other health issues, thought I'd try for an easy one! Mt Stromlo is an easy walk from the carpark up to the summit, then on to the northern hump, so I took a chair this time too!
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I had some time to get out and do some SOTA for the new year rollover and decided to do a bit more of a tricky one Booroomba Rocks, VK1/AC-026.
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After complaining about trying to hold a yagi, the microphone and write down contact details at the same time on SOTA summits, and receiving much advice, I set out to convert my 70cm beam to work on a squid pole! Relatively simple, drill holes for the u-bolt, and put on a coax socket so I can have an extended run of coax up the pole from the radio. And then the use of some PVC pipe so the squidpole doesn't get smooshed!
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Finally had a morning where I could get out and climb a hill! Decided to try Mt Tuggeranong VK1/AC-038, an easy walk and not too far a drive. Parked at the substation on Callister St in Theodore, as most people have in the past!
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While I was in Tassie, I had an opportunity to get a second activation done around Launceston. I asked my Dad which would be the easiest of the 10 pointers around, and he said Mt Barrow, 45 minute drive, and easy walk to the summit :)
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I've just got back from 2 weeks in Tassie, mostly to visit my Grandmother, and to celebrate her 90th birthday, which we did in some style at Stillwater in Launceston!
Car parked, ready for the summit!(read more...)
Got out to another SOTA summit today, VK1/AC-042. Started off on 2m and got VK1MA, booming in strong as always, not much further luck on 2m, so attempted to get going on HF, but there were problems!
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Well, I got my second SOTA activation done yesterday on Mt Stromlo, VK1/AC-043. I wanted to test out my gear, and make sure everything works, before I head to Tasmania in a few weeks, hopefully arriving after the SOTA association for VK7 goes live!
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I've managed to string up an 80m Off Centre Fed Dipole over the weekend, I managed a contact to Kentucky, USA, on 20m, and got a 59 report with my 100W and his gigantic yagi of doom! Also had a half dozen SOTA contacts on 40m and 20m over Sunday afternoon, so it's fair to say it works!
I had taken some photos, but it's actually really hard to see it in them! It's just some wires running through the trees.
Last night I spent some time with the local club's MFJ analyser (Thanks Gilbert!) and got an SWR graph of the antenna as installed:
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Woooo! Pretty excited, i had a day off yesterday, and in the afternoon thought I'd have a bit of a play with radios, and finally got a good DX SSB contact with my 5W OzQRP MST2. I managed to get to Europe, Coray France to be a bit more precise. It was with Frank, F5PAU, he's running 1KW into a yagi, a pretty impressive setup!
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I had a bit of fun on Saturday with the wia's [Rememberance Day](http://www.wia.org.au/members/contests/rdcontest/) amateur radio contest.
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Now that I know a bit more about antennas and why using a dipole in a yagi isn't so good, I decided to build a new one, following the WA5VJB's designs found on his [website](http://www.wa5vjb.com/yagi-pdf/cheapyagi.pdf).
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Today was the VK1 (And most of the rest of VK!) [SOTA](http://sota.org.uk) party, and I did my first ever activation on Mt Ainslie, VK1/AC-040, and had a bit of fun! I learnt just how far down the hill the activation zone starts, 25m altitude is a bit further than I thought!
Here's my chair at the summit pole, the end fed antenna is strung up in the trees to the left.
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Well, the Beach40 is boxed up and ready to test! Just working out what else I need to check before putting it on the air! Hopefully I'll be set up at 04:00 UTC tomorrow (2014-07-08), listen out somewhere between 7.007 and 7.230 :)
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Had a bit of a quiet weekend, didn't get a huge amount of radio stuff done, instead mostly housework, looking after the kids and on call work!
However, I got my dummy load built:
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Well, the soldering is finished anyway! Still have to find a box, get all the connecting hardware, shield the oscillator, and build the L-Match circuit (and maybe the fine tuning circuit, and RF pre-amp).
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Have got my Beach40's mic amplifier in, and tweaked the carrier suppression via the balance pot and cap. I'm managing a carrier suppression of 24 dB, which i don't think is too bad for a first time homebrew build, but I do need to get some non-capacitative flathead drivers, would make these things a bit easier!
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Well, I finally collected all the extra bits I needed, and had an hour or two to proceed further with my Beach40 build, and got my recieve audio amplifier circuit built:
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Well, after a week or so of experimentation, I've got a VOX circuit that works with my [OzQRP MST2](http://ozqrp.com)! In addition to the below VOX circuit, I put in isolation transformers and 40dB attenuators for the MST2's speaker out to my sound card's microphone input, and similarly for the revrse: sound card speaker out to MST2 microphone in.
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My legs are now a bit stiff and sore from going up and down a ladder for a few hours yesterday afternoon. Made a homebrew dipole with some cut and drilled $2 shop polyethylene chopping board and some cheap coax and wire from Jaycar. I used coax wound around a little toroid as a common mode choke
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Stuffed a few more bits on the beach40. Got the ring mixer in, and the first transformer. Also managed to solder a SOIC-8 chip to a MePad :)
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Today I'm at home watching the kids, and I decided to try some 20m contacts. After mucking about a bit with end fed half wave antennas, and not being happy with it, I decided to make the wire as per the instructions for the L-Match tuner I built (based on Peter, VK3YE's HF Portable youtube series), and 22m of wire appears to work much better than the 12m I did have.
I made a contact with Ron, VK3AFW portable 4, as he was doing a SOTA activation on VK4/SE105, which is a distance of 1249.8 km from home and I got a report of 5 and 7, which I hope isn't too bad with my 5 watts output.
Yay :)
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Well, after some help from the [Minimalist-QRP](https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Minimalist_QRP_Transceivers/info) yahoo group and members of the #technest irc channel, I've got my oscillator going a bit better!
It now covers from 7.0041 MHz to 7.2405 MHz, a much more useful range of the 40m band!
In the end I used two 7.2 MHz ceramic resonators in parallel, with the O leg of a jaycar varicap and a 1 µH inductor in series with that.
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I've started building Peter Parker [VK3YE](http://vk3ye.com)'s 40m Dual Side Band transciever, completing the oscillator Manhattan Style:
I've built it with some 7.2MHz resonators from [MiniKits](http://minikits.com.au), and with the 60-160 pF variable cap I have, it gets me from 6.938MHz to 7.049MHz. Which is not terribly useful for the 20m band (7.0 -> 7.3 MHz). So I'll have to tweak things and work out how to get more swing from the oscillator.
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Well, after getting my MST2 in an enclosure and looking Ok:
I went to a friendly ham's workshop and started aligning it. The receive slug tuning and mixer balancing went perfectly well. When we got to doing the transmit tuning, things started to go a bit skee-whiff! The MST2 turned off. So we replaced the fuse, which promptly blew, and another!
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Well, yesterday we continued the odyssey, and got all the capacitors and transistors in, finishing off today with the transformers and chokes, pin headers and crystals, so we're all done for the easy bits!
I had a few oddities, the instructions specified 1.8pF NPO caps, but the kit came with 2pF caps in place. I have a left over 2 pin header (which I just realised should go on the VFO input!), and no 3 pin header for the DDS-VFO power, a bit odd, but easily worked around :)
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In continuation of my radio building, I have started on my [OzQRP](http://ozqrp.com) MST2, 20m band SSB radio kit. Ordered on Wednesday, it arrived Thursday afternoon! It helps that I live quite close to where they're sent from!
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After passing my Standard Assesment, and receiving my Amateur Operator Certificate of Proficiency (Standard) yesterday, I'm now the proud owner of the amateur callsign VK1PAW!
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At the local [hackerspace](http://makehackvoid.com) tonight, I finally received a morse beacon from a satellite! Hooray! It was FO-29, an Amateur Radio satellite. You can find the wav file (22.05 kHz, mono 16 bit) I recorded of its CW beacon, on 435.795MHz [here](/downloads/f029-20140226.wav). The Morse is too fast for me to even translate it into dots and dashes! If you can keep up, please do let me know what it's saying!
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