vk2rh: a blog about ham radio

  • CW Academy FB

    Yesterday I had my final CW Academy session. As an indication of how good it was and how much we valued it, not one of the five of us ever missed a single session! There were sixteen hour-long sessions over two months. And it was all free! Late last year I noticed a couple of messages from…

  • New KD1JV ultralight rig for 80/160

    There’s been a higher than usual level of activity on the AT-Sprint email list over the last few days as  hints have emerged of a possible new offering of the popular MTR (Mountain Topper Radio) the latest of Steve Weber KD1JV’s radios that define the possibilities of ‘trail friendly’. To get a view of one…

  • Hidden heroes

    The BBC have just broadcast and put on YouTube an excellent hour long documentary about two people whose wartime work is credited with shortening the war and saving millions of lives. Yet because of the cold war and the climate of secrecy, credit came late or not at all. UPDATE: The YouTube video has been…

  • Solar news

    Under the title “Earth braces for biggest space storm in five years” ABC Australia’s online news reports on the last 24 hours of solar activity. A NOAA space scientist is quoted “Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours”. Further detail as usual from http://www.spaceweather.com and http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/today.html. UPDATE: 24 hours later – “Space storm fizzle“!

  • Big Day Out at Wyong

    Just back from a few hours spent at the annual field day at Wyong hosted by the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club. This has to be the big day out for Australian radio amateurs. People came from near and far. It’s a good barometer of the health of the hobby and the local industry supporting it.I was delighted to see…

  • At last the wait is over

    The final hours before the actual opening of orders for the new Elecraft KX3 saw a mix of bizarre behaviours on the KX3 email list from impatient petulance and other weirdly strange attention seeking. They were a tiny minority in a sea of patient fans happy with the frequent updates from the Elecraft team. In the end…

  • Waiting list update

    On Halloween Steve Weber KD1JV has announced to the AT-Sprint Yahoogroup he’s considering planning to take orders online for the ATS-4B at 11:11:11 AM, EDT on the 11th November, 2011. Clearly a time and date not to be forgotten. Shipping would follow close behind then. One exciting aspect of this latest ATS-4B version is the planned integrated…

  • ATS-4 b due late September / early October

    UPDATE: As of mid October the new availability date for the ATS-4B is November 2011. Also Steven Weber is developing a daughter board to enable the ATS-4B to decode PSK and CW – which has a January 2012 delivery date. This board can’t be added to the earlier ATS-4A.  Since late June, Steven Weber’s site at http://kd1jv.qrpradio.com has displayed a…

  • Ultraportable Elecraft KX3

    UPDATE: Steve G4GXL’s 10 minute YouTube video of Wayne N6KR’s quick overview of the new KX3 is available from http://qrparci.org. Also there are early photos on Twitpic here – courtesy of Jeff Davis KE9V including this one: Under the tantalising subject line “Something *really* new at Dayton from Elecraft” and while en route to Dayton – Elecraft’s Wayne Burdick N6KR announced…

  • Winnie the war winner

    The other day I noticed a very interesting photo on a fellow Australian ham blogger, Peter Mark’s site. The blog entry was titled a “Radio nerd’s tour of Canberra“. The first photo is described as ‘a transceiver with a nifty antenna tuner’. But the instant I saw it I sensed there was slightly more to it.…

  • QRP at Bamarang

    Last weekend I had a great time playing radio. Along with half a dozen other families and all our kids we went to spend the Easter weekend at the “mud brick mansion” at Bamarang on the Shoalhaven River, a few km west of Nowra on the south coast of New South Wales. Courtesy of the…

  • Monitoring Odyssey Dawn

    One of the most memorable DX programs was Radio Nederland’s Media Network presented by the energetic and innovative Jonathan Marks. Both the program and the presenter live on in different guises. I remember being astounded to hear intercepted military signals from the early hours of the Falklands War being broadcast on the program. Long before…