ben

My First Satellite Contacts with AO-92

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I’d only ever heard it was possible to work amateur satellites with hand held radios, and all the accompanying photos usually involved waving around a modest sized handheld Yagi. All that changed when I saw a posted a video posted on the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club Facebook page showing AO-92 being worked with Yaesu VX8 handheld with an after-market whip antenna.

A quick check of the passes saw really favourable conditions to work AO-92 as it passed overhead on Friday 14th December 2018 from around 11.22pm local time.

I quickly set up the frequencies in my IC-T90A, gave a couple of friends a heads up to listen for me and waited.

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WWFF Afternoon – Mount Field National Park VKFF-0347

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Activation from Wombat Moor in Mt Field NP.
We’ve had some fantastic weather down in VK7 recently, and today I decided to take full advantage of it with a solo trip to Mt Field National Park. This was mainly supposed to be a photography mission today, with the FT-817 thrown in “just in case”, however arriving at the park and seeing maybe around 100 cars I decided to put the photography on hold until later in the afternoon and headed up to Wombat Moore.

The linked dipole was in the car today, as fun as the EFHW is, the Dipole is much easier to set up as free standing.

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RD Contest 2017

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RTTY QSOs during 2017 RD Contest
RTTY QSOs during 2017 RD Contest

The 2017 RD Contest was over the weekend of August 12-13 and I was keen to participate this year, having been unable to participate last year due to my involvement in the Festival of Bright Ideas. With Tasmania winning the state vs state competition, I was keen to do my bit to defend that title.

With the waning solar cycle leading to pretty poor propagation conditions in my near NVIS antenna setup, my focus had been working local stations on VHF and higher bands. Critically, I was now in a position to take advantage of the allowed RTTY digital mode, which was worth double points on 144Mhz and 430Mhz, 4 points on the 23cm band, and a triple multiplier between 1am and 6am meaning there was up to 12 points per contact on offer!

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Where the Heck is VK7BEN?

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It’s been quite a while between posts, and in fact this is only my second post since January. It’s not because I have been slacking off though. So I’ll try and give a bit of an update as to whats been going on.

Pa posing for the camera, Huon River

A couple of weeks after my last post, my Grandfather died 🙁 It was for reasons known about to family, but it always happens sooner than you would like and the loss has been immense. I was particularly close to my grandfather and even 3 months later the thought that I can no longer see him is very raw and hard to deal with.

“Pa’s” influence on me has certainly be that of love for Tasmania’s vast wilderness. When I am not playing with amateur radio, I love taking photography of a wild Tasmania, of which you can see many of these photos over on Flickr.

Pa also encouraged my technical abilities and was fascinated by the things I was doing in the radio space, from who I contacted via DX, to how light could be modulated with audio along to being able to broadcast Television. As I said, I’ll miss my conversations with him.

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SOTA Activations VK7/SC-001 & VK7/SC-045

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Today I finally got around to activating my first summit – Mt Wellington VK7/SC-001.

Given I had a “very long weekend” for Australia Day, I was determined that I would get some portable radio operations in over the weekend. A work colleague Richard, VK7FLCS, had also expressed an interest in seeing how easy portable operation was so the date was set for early afternoon to activate Mt Wellington, and then Mount Rumney if time permitted.

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Experiments with an End Fed Half Wave Antenna

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Portable Setup, Mount Direction
Portable on Mount Direction

I went away to the Tasmania’s West Coast in October 2016 and had hoped to work some stations. For radio, the trip was a bit of a disaster with the place we were staying having lots of solar inverter noise. The other thing was that it was very tedious to use a linked dipole in the location I was in. Since that day I had resolved that I would try and end-fed antenna and see how that goes.

The End Fed Half Wave (EFHW) antenna is popular with many QRP Portable stations, particularly for activities such as SOTA or WWFF. The big drawback of the end-fed is the high impedances they have, which means that you need to carry some sort of Antenna tuner to match the impedance with the radio. The thought of lugging around an antenna tuner and then having to retune every time I switched frequency was less than appealing though.

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In the Beginning…

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Happy 2017 Everyone!

The New Year is about beginnings for many, so it seems as good a time as any to share my story about how I started in amateur radio.

I was introduced to Amateur Radio in the Early 1990s by Charles Payne, VK7PP. I met Charles when I was tracing back the history of my Heron Sailing Dinghy, Sobraon, at the time and which he and his son Andrew built in the 1970s. When he took me up to his study to find some photos, he pointed out all his amateur radio gear and showed me how to make contact. After that I visited several times over the next 2-3 years to explore amateur radio after school, before leaving for college meant that it was too difficult to visit.

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