27th January 2006, 06:38 pm
Living in “the bush” (rural Australia), we make do without facilities expected as givens by most townies. We don’t have reticulated water (we collect water from the roof), no sewer connection (we have a septic tank), no garbage collection (I make a monthly trip to the recycling depot and landfill transfer station). We do have power (albeit installed at no small cost with our very own 11 kV line and 16 kVA transformer).
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.
25th January 2006, 08:01 pm
Chris, DL6KAC, has created a directory of ham radio blogs. In his own blog, he comments that there is a sadly out-of-date blog in VK. That’d be me 
As I’ve commented before, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to be able to do everything that I might like to do (and have a day job too).
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.
16th October 2005, 02:55 pm
Kev, VK4KKD, emailed to the effect that there were quite a number of VK4’s coming up on the early morning AE (Aircraft Enhanced) propagation net, so I listened on 144.200 Mhz SSB a few mornings this week. I was rewarded with 3 QSOs into the Brisbane area on Friday morning. I worked VK4KKD, VK4AFL and VK3AON. Nothing especially outstanding distance-wise - all in the order of 350 km (220 miles) - but what is of note is that I worked them with 50 watts into a 13-ele beam lashed to the side of the pergola at 5m agl. Once I get a few larger beams on the tower at 25m agl then such QSOs should become commonplace.
… and then it’ll be interesting to see how far into southern VK2, and into VK3 I can get under “normal” conditions.
9th October 2005, 06:03 pm
There’s a bunch of early morning 2m SSB enthusiasts on the eastern Australian seaboard who make long distance contacts on a daily basis by reflecting their signals off aircraft. Regular contact is made between Brisbane and Sydney (and points in between) a distance in the order of 600 km.
At the midway point of the morning session, those in Sydney (plus/minus a few 100 km) turn their beams to the south-west and do the same in the direction of Melbourne. I don’t know how successful that component of the process is; Melbourne is 1000 km from me as the crow flies.
I used to participate a few years ago, but don’t have time these days.
They can be found on 144.200 Mhz between 7 and 9 am (give or take). At other times of the day, the 2m SSB calling channel is 144.100 Mhz.
