The MacAlba

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].

I recorded the carrier to noise level at the modem during a sun transit outage on my satellite-provided internet connection. The story and graph can be found in the technology category of my personal blog.

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.

I’ve moved my collection of 10m beacon audio files to a new location.

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.

Quite a few 2m and 70cm contacts have been made between VK and ZL over the past few weeks. The distance, depending on QTHs in question, are around the 2200 km mark.

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.

I discovered another useful amateur radio blog-related resource today. Ben Sutton has created Planet Ham, a web site which aggregates various radio-related blogs. This brings the content of multiple blogs to you in one place, rather than you visiting multiple websites. In my case, though, I use news aggregation software running on my computer so the content comes to me rather than me having to go out and visit it. I do this by making use of Planet Ham’s RSS feed to get the best of both worlds.

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/

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.

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.

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.