It’s now 33 years since I passed my UK 12 wpm morse exam at Stonehaven Radio (and became GM4DSZ). Having been mostly interested in VHF when living in the UK, I really only used CW when aurora were around. … and I’ve not used CW much at all in the past few decades.

Now, being involved with the implementation of a new data network at work utilising a dual 10 gigabit/s backbone, there seems to be some sort of inverted perversity to getting my morse speed up to, say, 30 words per minute ( ~ 30 bits / second).

I’ve spent some time over the past few days just tuning around various HF bands just to reacquaint myself with band conditions.

… and its been pretty quiet overall.

Just ten minutes ago I was tuning around 80 m - I heard two VK SSB nets on the go and one CW station. Nothing else. Nada. Zilch.

But the CW station on 3509 khz (RST 529 at 1057 UTC) turned out to be W1FV calling CQ DX!!! That’s a fair haul from here (in QF59). Good old 80 m. Now, where on earth is my Bencher keyer?

Later this year I’ll be heading west into the Australian outback (including the Birdsville Track) for what will be about a 5000 km (3100 mile) round trip. It’s an opportunity to take my ham-radio equipment along for fun and safety (and see what I might be able to do on 2m SSB (Aircraft Enhanced mode) and digital modes). For HF I have a Terlin Outbacker mobile antenna but it’s not been used much to date. Last weekend I attached it to the bull-bar on my Hi-Lux truck and gave it a test.

I don’t have a permanent mobile installation so the setup was, of necessity, rather primitive. I used an Icom IC-706 MkIIG, and an MFJ desktop antenna tuner sitting on the passenger seat to feed the antenna. I don’t have any earth strap installed to the vehicle chassis yet, so was a bit worried about the effects that would have. The vehicle has a diesel engine so that probably helps to keep the noise level down.

With everything plugged in, and the engine running, the S-meter sat with zero noise level so I was happy. I made a quick contact on 40m just to get a signal report. I worked VK5ZKT/P near Adelaide ( a distance over well over 1000km) so I was happy with that result too.

Over the coming months I’ll set about upgrading the setup to give a slightly more permanent mobile installation.

[Ref: Outbacker antenna info can be found here].

A photograph of the satellite antenna that’s on the house roof and that’s used for the internet link can be found on my photoblog.

The files can now be found at http://vk2djg.net/beacons/

They recordings are pretty old now, I haven’t had much (any) time to spend on such pursuits in recent times.

Contacts made this way are mainly due to tropospheric propagation. High pressure zones, and high temperatures forming ducts aid and abet those seeking contacts.

It’s harder for me to work into ZL because I’m about 120 km inland - and 1 km high. It’s harder for my signals to enter a duct, or otherwise made it across the water.

PlanetPlanet is the home base for the software that Ben uses. It lists a subset of like-minded, aggregated blogs. Others that I read include Planet Linux Australia and TextPlanet.

Planet Ham can be found at http://www.planetham.com/

We don’t have a copper-based telephone connection (we have three 32 kbit/s radio channels via a microwave link to the microwave hub 19 kms distant). The latter gives a decent 46 kbit/s dialup modem connection - but that’s it. We could pay for a kilometre or so of copper to connect the the telco copper (they’d have to lay 6 km themselves). Even so, the nearest exchange doesn’t do ISDN or ADSL.

The only reasonable way of achieving a high-speed connection to the ‘net is with a 2-way satellite service. And today, after weighing the pros and cons for about 12 months, I ordered such a service. The one I’ve gone for has 512 kbit/s downlink / 64 kbit/s uplink. I’ve also ordered a public IP address (to give VPN access to work from home, and access to my home server from work or elsewhere).

I expect to see this installed within the next 4 weeks.

I just hope that there’s no interference into my ham radio receivers - then I’d be sorry!

I’ll keep you posted.

At least my photoblog is has had daily posts for several months now. It’s worth checking out, even if I do say so myself
Chris’ directory of ham radio blogs is here, please add your blog to it if it’s not already there.