Mount Gawler vk5/se-013 is my first activation for 2016.

The weather was nice and cool and the Tour Down Under cycle race started today so I decided to activate a summit on the way to watch the Women’s race go by at Mount Torrens in the Adelaide Hills..

Parked nearby the set up area the bush is slowly recovering from a bush fire in 2015 easy summit to access .

Lots of burnt out trees in woods and forest country across the road and still very dry from months of no rain this summer .

So once set up I was glad to start out with a S2S, VK1VIC/2 was very clear and strong on 40m ssb so I knew it was going to be ok to qualify the summit and as it turned out I got 3 qso’s from the same summit with VK1VIC/2 , VK1FAJW/2 and VK4JAZ/2 so 3 S2S QSO’s right from get go. Unfortunately no short skip to VK5 again with only a very low signal qso with Ian VK5IS on cw and VK5AO Mait who was just below me in Adelaide, luckily the vk 2 3 and 4 stations were quite strong on 40m cw.

On this summits it is hard to set the antenna up under the trees and I could only run out the dipoles north south direction which would later make it harder to qso to Japan on 15m . The wx was a nice breeze to keep cool but not really fill out the flags all the time.

Once roll over came I went on 40m ssb and made some qso’s mostly with the same chasers I had worked on cw giving them some extra points but with conditions poor for the locals I could not complete a couple qso’s I am sorry.

The Large tree over the fence only allowed me to put the dipole up end on to Japan which probably did not help my signal but with the FT 857 I was running 25 watts on cw . I noticed the internal noise in the 857 is not as quiet as the kx3 and the DSP filtering was turned off helping improved my reception when working hard to pull out the week signals. No man made noise was evident and 15m was very quiet but with low signals and qsb we had to repeat reports several times and keep listening for the qsb to go up. With this type of conditions it is good practice to slow the cw speed down and just send the RST three or four times no other information/chatter.  JJ1SWI/1 Go was on summit JA/KN-020 in Kanagawa and he had the best signal considering conditions, then Mot JP1QEC/1 who was portable in a park was workable as well. Mot is my friend on Face book and I have chased him on summits before from my home, so we were proving the possibility of a s2s one day. I was very pleased NS7P Phil was able to make contact with me, its been a while since I heard from him.

This SOTA station was a FT 857 running 25 watts on ssb and cw the antennas are my newly made 40/20m and 30m/15m link dipoles fed with rg 174 feed line and in this case both inverted V’s were up 7 metres . New wire is from SOTA beams which I think is great antenna wire, the link dipoles are made up from the dipole design on sota maps.org page which has a great antenna design feature. Even down to the length of the support strings needed for my set up with a 8m squid pole and keeping with the 60 deg angle of the inverted V. The software calculates for you the length of wires needed to get the two bands you are aiming for, the length of cord needed for end supports and I call my tent pegs .1m .  Very little tuning is needed to get it resonate in the area I want to operate in if you follow the design plan.

Working the pile up .

Thanks everyone for chasing and S2S, sorry to those who I could not work .

23 contacts plus 2 uncompleted from the qsb.

Thanks for your interest in my blog.

cheers from

Ian vk5cz ..

Now that I have finished my 2015 lap of the Summits I can get access to I will not be activating until after the new year.

Then if grape harvest kicks off I hope to be busy during February March on that job but if we get a thunder storm to dampen down the fire danger I might get a couple summits done during the later part of summer.  I usually activate Mount Gawler when the Tour Down Under bike race is in the Adelaide Hills that way I can do an activation then go watch the bike race go by somewhere in the Hills. Mount Gawler is a safe summit to activate and I never bother to enter the owners property the trig is just a short way over his fence so I set up by the gate. With Japan being on SOTA now I am always trying to work them on 15/17 m and if I get a cool morning I set up out side in the yard to try to work them proving the possibility  for a S2S one day  to Japan. I have made several QRP qso”s to Japan before so no reason why it can’t happen again .

I was thinking of trying a vertical half wave wire when I get the chance to set it up and test it but the weather has been so hot on most weekends its still a guna do project. The last cooler weekend Halima helped me fix my dipoles for the home station that needed some fixing as trees have grown up around them and they needed lifting higher to avoid rubbing on my antenna ropes etc ,this was the main reason they fell down.

  My last SOTA for 2015 at Wagga Wagga.

 Keen to use my new HB1B Mark 3 this year for cw activations.

Been playing with those end fed antennas again and I got a 53 foot EFRW on test at the moment with 6 feet of counterpoise. The KX3 atu tunes it easily on 40 20 15 m with just a binding post and banana pugs to connect it to the rig. Using the FT857 I have the MFJ 904 in use with a list of inductance and capacitance setting jotted down in my log for quicker selection when changing bands. The HB1B has the MT 1 end fed wire tuner to use with the qrp rigs and it has a nice selection of inductance and tunes it easily also on the above bands. So what I mostly need now is some better propagation to give things a work out. I have spent a few cooler evenings down the hill at the test site but the higher bands seem to die off as the sun goes down with not even beacons that readable on 20 or 15 so its a bit hard to round up a qso. I did get a shock on one evening just as I was about to pack up and escape the mozzies flying sorties I put out cq on 40m and got an answer from KI8R much to my surprise. I was running the 857 at 30 watts and USA was directly behind me so the signal must have been going out the back side of the antenna . Being 53 feet long I have it set up to slope down with 10.6 metres on the longer side and the remanding 6 odd metres past the top of the squid pole and lots of cord going out to continue the inverted V shape of the antenna. Not sure what the radiation pattern would actually be or where most of the signal goes , probably lost in the tuner at ground level.

Well 3 years are up since SOTA started off in South Australia on 01/10/2012 and the activating events are slowly getting less not more.

2012   8 summits 26 accumulated activation points with 7 chasers from vk5.

2013  135 summits 339 accumulated activation points with 18 chasers from vk5.

2014  192 summits 497 accumulated activation points with 23 chasers from vk5.

2015  119 summits 376 accumulated activation points with 18 chasers from vk5.

Since we started there have been 21 activators from vk5 taking part accumulating 454 activations gaining 1239 points.

and 30 chasers from vk5 taking part accumulating 7624 chaser points so far from vk5 activators.

Some activators who are from interstate or unregistered may have taken part in that time frame but figures are unknown and some  chasers are not registered with the program so they can’t be easily accounted for either.

Since SOTA got started in vk5 the following chasers have accumulated points from vk5 other Australian States and also DX activations.

2012: 7 chasers collected 237 points, vk5 activators gave out 26 points

2013: 18 chasers collected 9,103 points, vk5 activators gave out 339 points

2014: 23 chasers collected 16,575 points, vk5 activators gave out 497 points

2015: 18 chasers collected 11,402 points, vk5 activators gave out 376 points

Not sure how that stacks up but it seems to me more activators are needed in vk5 and the other problem is the low value of the summits with regards height above sea level and proximity of the summits for easy access.

The activations Hugh and I did this season we easily travelled 500 km each trip for every activation. Some summits were closer for me in the mid north and I did manage to activate 44 summits for this season.

I only have 1 summit left to activate this year that I normally include in my lap but with the weather heating up much earlier I may not get to activate that summit.

Hill se-006 is an unnamed Summit in the SOTA program, we often have Summits like this and just refer to them by the SOTA reference. After an un eventful dusty drive back from Waite Hill we found Hill se-006 just east of Whyte Yarcowie up a dead end road into the property. We saw many Kangaroos here I recon its the most I have seen in one mob in a long time . The track to the summit was quite easy to get along and we headed up to the top of the hill picking a line along the saddle which was quite easy this time. One thing that was new was we had to take a sledge hammer and our own picket into the activation zone as this hill has not trig or trees. We did find a Box Thorn bush on the western edge so we set up there.

 Looking north.

 View to our morning summit .

 View south from the edge of the summit wind farms way off to south.

 Hugh setting up we had a great take off point and antenna was up high.

 Working the pile up.

Hugh made a nice score this time on 40m with band conditions still a bit hard on the closer in stations so I just went to cw when my turn came about. I worked several of my faithful chasers in vk 2 3 4 7 with vk7cw Steve sending with his side winder key which sounds like a bird singing in a tree to me. I don’t hear many on this type of key but as Steve is a master of it, it sounds really nice, bit like a bug key but better I think. Being early morning in Europe I went on 20m cw and straight away had a pile up of EU stations chasing with good signals so it was great to be among the dx after a long spell of poor conditions or timing on the summit. John vk6nu found me this time as well which was my only vk station on 20m and 40m was no good to the west, so glad you found me John. After the rage died down and I run out of EU chasers I went back to 40m ssb to find Nev waiting for me on the ssb frequency and to our surprise he was 20 over 9 this time but an hour before there was no chance of a qso at all. In the quiet location on the summit Hugh could hear Nev but he was not responding to us so we put it down to really high noise and low signal at his end. Adrian came up as well as he was waiting there as well to see if we came back to ssb from cw.

We travelled 360 km this trip which is shorter than usual but with band conditions much better it ended up being a great day out.

Thanks to our band of chasers and land owners for the tracks and Hill.

Waite Hill is a great summit, the highest point in the Porcupine Ranges east of Terowie. Hugh and I left early in the morning to head there as we had two summits for the day planned . It was my turn to give the Colorado a run at some 4×4 this time and we saw many Kangaroos and Emus on the way so we had to be careful along the roads not to hit them.

 Ready for the challenge climbing this one it is very steep and rocky right from go.

  Hugh is off picking the line I have my hat on backwards looking up.

 The summit is up here somewhere, it was about an hour hike.

 Waite Hill Summit highest point in photo.

 Sleepy Lizard using a rock for a pillow getting some sun.

 The top.

 Hugh in the pile up .

We had reasonable conditions on 40m for a change but the skip was still quite long, Hugh was able to work Paul vk5pas but the rest were interstate and Mt Gambier contacts. I made 4 qso on ssb then Tony wanted a cw qso so I went to cw mode and worked another 5 stations. One thing I did not realise when Hugh was on air my KX3 was set to about 3 Watts as I had been testing it in my shack last week and forgot to reset the output power. But we got enough to qualify and get the job done then a steady hike back down to the ute and a bite of lunch before the 4×4 track back to good roads which takes about an hour with Hugh working off the soreness opening gates this time.

Thanks to all the chasers for the contacts and land owners for the tracks and hills.

Once we had lunch sitting under a nice  Southern Cyprus Pine, we got Mitsi under way as best we could on the station tracks mostly around 60km per hour across blue bush country. It was probably 50km of these tracks with gates to get up as far as Yunta before we could hit the Black Top. The mobile phone had been on flight mode for quite a while in the morning so once we got back to service we had to deal with emails and txt messages re what time we may make Nackara Hill. Hugh had Mitsi on the speed limit + on the black top to catch up some time as we had to travel about 40km back down south again then head out west this time to the hill. It was a over grown track into the base of the hill and a big steep climb to the top which we had to walk because a lot of wash outs prevented us from getting up to a saddle which would have been a good launching spot.

Great view out to where we were in the morning I think the bump way off in the distance is Pualco Range.

After much leg burning we made the top, it sure pays to zig zag as best you can and some times you pick up on a contoured sheep track .

 Not sure what happened to this trig point but it is a bit knocked around .

 There was a big mob of flies around here so we moved back a way to get protection and find a sheoak tree to put up the squid pole.

 This old tree has seen it all.

Hugh went first this time and made a nice score then I did also with a nice amount of 40m cw chasers but still no short skip . We both made a S2S qso with Andrew VK1NAM who was keen to pick up our unique summit for the first time and that was the only S2S we made on this trip.  These differing propagation events are becoming a problem for chasers inside the first 100 km or so, we just can not hear one and other .  40m was really good to vk 1 2 3 4 and only stations several 100km away were able to be worked. I worked Amanda VK3FQSO with a perfectly readable signal and she was running 1 watt of power which was an opposite extreme to others we could not hear with higher powered stations. Really hard conditions lately and I hope it is not a sign of what is to come as the cycle really starts the down turn.

 Typical view of the area rocks, saltbush, spinifex and low mallee scrub where it is not as windy and can survive is this harsh old land of ours.

Thanks to all the chasers for giving us the contacts sorry to those who missed out even though we knew you were out there trying. Thanks to Hugh’s good work for liaising with land owners re permission, and off course said land owners for the tracks and hills.

cheers for now

De Ian vk5cz ..

Out of Bed 4.30 am on Friday 11th to get organised to meet Hugh at his house to reload Mitsi for our journey to Pualco Range vk5/ne-107. This time after much investigative work from Hugh he found an easier way to get there, last year we just kept travelling east across the salt bush plain when the track run out. We entered into sheep station country east of Mount Bryan and followed some good dirt roads for about 50 km before out first fence line track to the entrance to the summit paddock which is about 40 square miles. The track  inside the paddock was in good order and some creek crossings had been fixed and we made the northern side of the summit in about 3 hours from Hugh’s house.

 That’s the summit in the back ground we are on a ridge line here gaining altitude before the main assault there are big Yacca’s growing here and lots of spinifex grass and a few Mallee trees.

We huffed and puffed for another kilometre along this ridge then it got steep and lots of rock ledges to pick a way through, Hugh is the lead goat on these climbs and is good at reading the terrain to find a way.

   Hugh is on a mission.

   I need a spell and to run some guts off, fancy taking the photo as I exhaled.

Great view out to the west from here, we are just over half way to the top.

  The stone Cairn has collapsed on the trig but we made it.

 Hard at it working my faithful following on cw I managed to get 4 on cw and 4 on ssb so qualified on each mode then handed over to Hugh while everyone was still interested.

 Hugh making a score, it was windy so ear buds were needed, the wx was  a very pleasant day not too hot.

 View out East, we need to investigate if that hill is not a summit also.

 View to the South.

 View east along the range from the top .

 The antenna Sota beams 20/40 link dipole 8m hi and KX3 at 10 watts.

 A Brachyscome bush in full bloom , pretty harsh environment to survive in but I must say the country looked nice and as lush as it can . Lots of Kangaroos with young Joeys so they must know the season is good, saw a few ferrel goat but not many .

 I recon these are the biggest Yaccas I have ever seen they must be hundreds of years old and still look nice and healthy.

Well not much else to say about this one but I was relieved to find 40m in fairly good shape as we have had bad conditions for my last two activations barely qualifying at times. 20m to vk4 was really good on cw . Thanks to all the chasers and sorry to those in the short skip zone we could not work.

Thanks Hugh for all the ground work finding permission from land owners and a way to get there easier than last time well done. We travelled some good made roads, fence lines and station tracks with lots of gates to open and close it was a way to keep my body loosened up jumping in and out of Mitsi.

Lets head off the our next activation Kanaka Hill in the afternoon.

cheers from Ian vk5cz and Hugh vk5nhg ..

After more Lemon Meringue pie at Quorn while I wrote up my previous Blog for Mt Jay South I headed off up to The Argadels where I was booked to stay for the night and 4×4 to Mt Arden the next morning. After a nice greeting from Judy she showed me the cabin I was to stay in which was very nice and even had rain water for the shower which was great. Once I unpacked I decided to go have a look at the track to Mount Arden as a trial run because it was my first serious 4×4 climb in my own vehicle. I must say I was not let down it is a steep and rocky climb with many loose stones on the track which have been dug up and spat out by previous travellers on this hill. Its funny when the pressure is on I seem to grip the steering wheel really tight and get sweaty palms under pressure , it was working I had all of the above symptoms.  I made the mistake of thinking maybe 1st low range would be a good gear but it turned out to be too low and the Colorado was revving like mad just to keep the momentum up for the obstacles I encountered but we made it to the top. The transfer box had that hot oily smell.

Once I turned around to come down it did not seem as steep but I was careful all the same. At a water way half way down I stopped and did some track repairs by picking up the large boulders and filling in some wash outs to help preserve the track.

 It don’t look much but it gains about 150m asl in 500m distance. There is a 15 m high comms tower up there but you can’t see it from here.

 Great Views all around.

On Sunday morning I tried 2cnd low range on the climb and with all the boulders shifted the Colorado made the climb without all the revving and was much easier to control the wheel slip, the torque e 3 litre   D Max  did the rest, a lesson learnt by me.

I said before how bad 40m band conditions were yesterday on Mt Jay South, well for something to do after evening meal I set up my 53 foot EFRW at the cabin and had a 30 minute QSO with JA1NUT on 40m cw with 8 watts. He had a big signal he was beaming to Russia when I called him but he heard me and turned his 3 el 40m yagi to me and gave me 579 , not bad for 8 w and efrw to JA on 40m.

How ever back to my activation today band conditions were pretty poor again on the short skip but I did manage several vk1 vk2 vk3 vk4 and several S2S contacts on cw and ssb modes.  But today I had to leave the summit with out working Nev vk5wg, I just could not hear him nor he hear me . No short skip on 40m and too far for 2m simplex on the handy rig.

 Did the old walk out, walk into activation zone today just to keep it honest.

 Great take off point all around from here used my 53 foot EFRW with 9 foot counter poise very convenient sign for sticking up my Squidy.

 My shack for the activation these rocks were dug out of the footings holes for the comms towers. KX3 tunes 53 foot wire easily on 15 17 20 40 m with 9 feet cp.

 One of the great views from up here, 3 summits in view, Dutchmans, Mount Brown and of course Mount Remarkable way off to the south in the haze.

OK well thanks to the many who chased me today under trying conditions and I managed 26 qso’s with another 5 S2S contacts to log. three qso’s were after UTC roll over so I will make mention in my log when I enter the days scores.

 This lazy sod was in middle of the road and I had to stop and shift him he was enjoying some of his first spring sunshine for this year. He was pretty docile so maybe he has not been awake for long.

Thanks to Judy and Malcolm for a great place to stay and a big hill to climb .

cheers  Ian vk5cz ..