Ever since I bought my FT-818ND I wasn’t really happy with the internal battery. Although the FT-818ND came with a larger battery (and a better charging circuit to handle the bigger battery) it still wasn’t really up to scratch. I found that when out portable it’s useable life was really only about 1.5 hours and …
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Today I went out to do another VKFF activation, as was the case last time, lessons were learned (re-learned?) and added a list of things to check/do before the next one. Packing the gear into the car this morning I threw an Alert up last night using the ParknPeaks iOS app version 3 beta (Shoutout …
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A few weeks ago I went on the hunt for an FT-950. I/’ve always wanted one and believed it would make a nice home rig for my activities – mainly chasing WWFF and SOTA activators when I’m at home. I scoured the second hand websites, Gumtree, Facebook and eBay and found two. One on eBay …
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I got a delivery notification this morning. It was that my 6-pin mini din cables were in the post to arrive today. One of the components of the interfaces that have been tough to track down have been these cables which are needed to interface to the “data” port on the back of the radio. …
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I headed back up to Wambool Nature Reserve today to finish off my activation I started earlier in the week. On my first outing here I managed 17 QSOs, which qualified me for VKFF but I wanted to head back to finish off the WWFF. I planned to camp out over the UTC rollover again …
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I picked up an FT-50R recently in a “box of random cables”, the battery was flat, it was missing an antenna and one of the knobs was missing. I borrowed the antenna from my Baofeng UV-3R original that I won in a raffle at the SERG convention I can’t remember how many years ago, and …
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Shortly after acquiring my FT-818ND I had a bunch of mods for it that I wanted to perform. I’ve had one once before and wasn’t really happy with the speech output on SSB, and the lack of DSP was annoying. So I had a look to see if the “One Big Punch” mic mod was …
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Now that my license has come through, I was looking to get out and start using the FT-818 for what I bought it for – QRP work. Looking at the various offerings for QRP, there’s a little bit more available compared to what was on offer last time, SOTA, POTA, WWFF, just to name a …
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WOOHOO! So yeah, I got my license, I’m now officially VK2MES, formerly VK3XJM and VK3HGI. I ended up getting the invoice early in the morning of Easter Friday which I found a little peculiar, but I paid it via the ACMA portal and within half an hour I had my license in my inbox and …
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UPDATE: In a previous revision of this post, I posted results on my VNA that showed this antenna gave a good SWR on virtually all the bands from 40-10. Further experimentation has shown this NOT to be the case. I believe the issue that was leading me to believe the “too good to be true” …
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