The trusty SARK-110 was dragged out to check an antenna the other day, and as usual, a cross check of the website to verify and update the firmware Released in March 2020. V0.10.19(b) is the late...
Earlier in the year, Icom released the IC-7300, an SDR based Ham Radio, it was the first of the big three commercial ham radio manufactures to provide an all in one desktop SDR based device. This...
http://www.vk3bq.com/2016/09/04/vk3bq-cliptastic-tenna-review/
A couple of months ago, the SOTABeams Facebook page Posted a link to a new item they had just finished making. A simple pair of lightweight dipole traps for portable use to help with running mu...
Australia Day offers the opportunity to use a special callsign, Australian hams are allowed to use the prefix AX instead of VK on a handful of days throughout the year. I had to be in and around ...
http://www.vk3bq.com/2015/01/27/sota-activation-vk3vc-031-arthurs-seat-2015/
Work took me into country north eastern Victoria. A long day of tasks and driving, a 700km loop! I packed my sota backpack into the car just in case i had time to drop past a summit and undertake...
http://www.vk3bq.com/2015/01/17/sota-activation-vk3ve-204-paps/
Sota rules allow one summit activation (for the activator points) per calendar year, and the program runs to UTC time. In Australia we are lucky that we are 10(11)hrs in front of the UTC date lin...
http://www.vk3bq.com/2015/01/06/sota-activations-new-years-2015/
Ive been looking for a bag or case for the SARK-110 for months. I had a look at point and shoot camera bags/cases, but they were all too small for the added bits or too bulky for what I had/wante...
I had some time yesterday afternoon to tune up the wire i am using with the 1:1 Balun dipole project. I set myself up outside and ran out the dipole as I would deploy it for a SOTA activation. T...
http://www.vk3bq.com/2014/09/25/tuning-dipole-using-11-balun/
To Balun or Not to Balun, this is the question? Like Ford vs Holden, Canon vs Nikon or Yaesu vs Icom; the world is divided into two camps on how best to connect a resonate wire antenna to a bit o...
The trouble with operating from a car is, modern cars with electronic systems can be RF noisy! The diesel D4D engine in my Prado 150 series is no exception. With many sources of noise on the HF b...
http://www.vk3bq.com/2014/09/24/fixing-radio-noisy-prado-150-diesel/