Operations

Operations

ISS SSTV Expedition 73

by

Between the 5th -12th May, there was a special ARISS/Russia SSTV expedition celebrating Victory Day on May 9, representing the victory of the Soviet Union over Germany in WWII.

Conditions were challenging with the timing of the SSTV transmission intervals often resulting in being only able to receive one complete image in the 9-11min AOS window, rather than being comfortably able to comfortably receive two images. The image above was the only 100% copy I received, with all other images experiencing some form of signal fade.

The other big challenge was that due to a quirk in choice of twelve images, it can be particularly difficult to get a copy of all 12, and quite often you get many of the same. During the event I ended up collecting 3 of image numbers #1,#2, #10, two images of #12, #3 and a single image of the remaining images.

Thanks to Karn E20ZFD, who often makes these fantastic backgrounds for people to collect and share their images from SSTV Events. Do click on the Image to enlarge!

AX7BEN – Anzac Day 2025

by
Map depicting contacts made on ANZAC Day 2025

There are 3 days each year that Australian amateur radio operators are permitted to operated with an ‘AX’ prefix:

This year has been the first year in a very long time that I have remembered I can use the AX prefix, I have had the motivation and the radio shack readiness have converged to where I spent the day working the world on FT8.

Over the course of several hours, I managed to work a total of 255 contacts starting on the 10m (28.074Mhz) band in the morning, and then moving down to the 17m band (18.1Mhz) in the afternoon.

To put this into some perspective, in recent years I have only been making less than 50 contacts for the entire year (outside of contesting).

For those who did make a contact with me, a special eQSL(tm) card should now waiting for you:

AX7BEN ANZAC Day special event QSL Card.

Please note that there were quite a few stations with incomplete QSOs, often with failure to acknowledge my sent report – those QSOs have been not been added to the log.

IARU 100 Year Anniversary Diploma

by

To celebrate 100 years of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU), the Spanish Unión de Radioaficionados Españoles (URE) has made available a diploma for successfully contacting special event stations during the 100 year celebration throughout April.

Over Easter I was lucky enough to contact the requisite number of stations during some exceptional propagation conditions, with the provisional diploma available shortly after.

The event concludes on 30th April, so you still have time to earn this award.

eQSL eJapan & eDX Awards

by

Not much to say other than I have managed to achieve the eQSL eJapan award 🙂

There has been some exceptional propagation activity in the last week on the 10m band into Asia, which has resulted in a lot of FT8 contacts in the region:

Shortly after confirming the eJapan certificate I was able to work1 more country and also was able to obtain the eDX certificate too!

ARISS Expedition 72 Images

by

Ticking another thing off my bucket list this year has been the reception of SSTV images from the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the ARISS Expedition 72 – Series 23 Holidays 2024 mission.

Receiving the images is almost trivial – provided you have an antenna and a radio receiver capable of receiving 145.800Mhz FM, you can use your favourite Slow Scan Television software to receive the images.

2024 ARISS-Canada SSTV Image received in PD120 Format.

By far the best image of the day was received on the 2024-12-29 0822UTC pass of the space station, which had a maximum elevation of around 50 degrees, with the image captured during the latter half of pass as the ISS was declining in elevation out to the East.

Earlier images were taken as the ISS was rising in the West, and I can only assume that the deep signal fades (the noisy green bars) were the result of atmospheric conditions and the receiving pattern of my VHF antenna – not so much the antenna itself but the immediate environment around it that would be impacting the signal received.

2024 ARISS-Canada SSTV Image received in PD120 Format.
2024 ARISS-Canada SSTV Image received in PD120 Format.
2024 ARISS-Japan SSTV Image received in PD120 Format.
2024 ARISS-Canada SSTV Image received in PD120 Format.
2024 ARISS-Canada SSTV Image received in PD120 Format.

Overall I am pretty happy to be able to say I have received images from the ISS. Maybe I should aspire to make an FM contact with RS0ISS/NA1SS some time and see if I get a response back 🙂

Icing on the cake was being able to submit these images to the ARISS gallery website, and get a nice certificate for it!

My First Satellite Contacts with AO-92

by

I’d only ever heard it was possible to work amateur satellites with hand held radios, and all the accompanying photos usually involved waving around a modest sized handheld Yagi. All that changed when I saw a posted a video posted on the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club Facebook page showing AO-92 being worked with Yaesu VX8 handheld with an after-market whip antenna.

A quick check of the passes saw really favourable conditions to work AO-92 as it passed overhead on Friday 14th December 2018 from around 11.22pm local time.

I quickly set up the frequencies in my IC-T90A, gave a couple of friends a heads up to listen for me and waited.

Read more

RD Contest 2017

by

RTTY QSOs during 2017 RD Contest
RTTY QSOs during 2017 RD Contest

The 2017 RD Contest was over the weekend of August 12-13 and I was keen to participate this year, having been unable to participate last year due to my involvement in the Festival of Bright Ideas. With Tasmania winning the state vs state competition, I was keen to do my bit to defend that title.

With the waning solar cycle leading to pretty poor propagation conditions in my near NVIS antenna setup, my focus had been working local stations on VHF and higher bands. Critically, I was now in a position to take advantage of the allowed RTTY digital mode, which was worth double points on 144Mhz and 430Mhz, 4 points on the 23cm band, and a triple multiplier between 1am and 6am meaning there was up to 12 points per contact on offer!

Read more

Where the Heck is VK7BEN?

by

It’s been quite a while between posts, and in fact this is only my second post since January. It’s not because I have been slacking off though. So I’ll try and give a bit of an update as to whats been going on.

Pa posing for the camera, Huon River

A couple of weeks after my last post, my Grandfather died 🙁 It was for reasons known about to family, but it always happens sooner than you would like and the loss has been immense. I was particularly close to my grandfather and even 3 months later the thought that I can no longer see him is very raw and hard to deal with.

“Pa’s” influence on me has certainly be that of love for Tasmania’s vast wilderness. When I am not playing with amateur radio, I love taking photography of a wild Tasmania, of which you can see many of these photos over on Flickr.

Pa also encouraged my technical abilities and was fascinated by the things I was doing in the radio space, from who I contacted via DX, to how light could be modulated with audio along to being able to broadcast Television. As I said, I’ll miss my conversations with him.

Read more

2016 Oceania SSB DX Contest

by

Over the weekend, the 2016 Oceania DX Contest was held. This was my first contest for the season, having missed this years RD Contest due to other commitments.

This year was definitely hard going compared to last year, with band propagation conditions truly terrible throughout the contest and then suffering the static crashes from a lightning storm occurring on the SA/NSW/VIC border later on Sunday afternoon. I wasn’t being particularly serious about the event this year, and therefore much of the time was spent in “search and pounce” mode making the initial contacts and then after the initial flurry, going off to do something else and returning to the radio every half hour or so to spin the dial and listen for any new signals.

And new signals were very few and far between, with only 9 contacts logged in the last 12 hours of the contest, with most bands only answering with the sound of the noise floor up until the last 3 hours of the contest on Sunday.

In the end I managed 42 contacts over the 24 hours of the contest, with the band split below:

Band QSOs
1.8 2
3.5 14
7 16
14 10

In comparison, this is around half the contacts from my 2015 contest effort. Notably last year there was much more activity on 20m (39 contacts) than this year, and 15m saw some contacts where this year there was none.

During the contest, I think my highlights would have been working 2 stations on 160m – it’s very rare for me to work anything at all on “top band”, along with being able to exchange contacts with stations I knew such as IK4GRO and VK5PAS (Hi Paul!).

Well the next big contest is CQWW SSB, which will be “The Big One”. Looking forward to it.

Letting the Smoke Out I

by

Oops

Above is a rather fine example of letting the smoke out. My last post talked about replacing a dipole that had worked well for many years but suddenly not so much. With the options of breaking it all apart to check the inside pieces, or throwing out the antenna, I chose the former.

What you are looking at is a very cooked load. Originally 9 10k ohm resistors in parallel are now well in truly charred. behind this (as evidenced by red winding wire) is a ferrite rod with a coil wrapped around it, in parallel with the resistor bank. These loads are used to give the antenna its low SWR across all bands.

Cooking the loads occurs when you forget there is a difference between Px and Py power and also forget that most baluns/loads can take a greater amount of the former over the latter. In this case my new radio allowed me to transmit 100 watts of PSK31, when the antenna was only rated for 50 watts.

It’s not out of the realms of possibility to repair this, should the ferrites in the loads and balun still be in working order. However when you take into consideration that I am would probably need to replace most of the stainless steel wire, obtain replacement resistors and still end up with a balun of questionable integrity (due to aforementioned power excesses), it may be time to recover what I can from the antenna and throw out the remains.