QRP by the bay

Peter, VK3YE, is a wonderful evangelist for home brew and QRP radio. As well as publishing videos and books, he organises a twice yearly home brew QRP meet up at Chelsea beach near his home in Melbourne, Australia.

This year, I travelled from Sydney and Peter kindly met me at the iconic pier that is often seen in his videos.

Although quite hot, we eventually took over a shady spot and various home brew radios were displayed and discussed.

Lots of Bitx40s as you might expect. I brought an MMR40 which I like for its compact size and interesting permeability tuning.

There's an audio description of the event here including a description of the rig below.

Conditions on the day were not good on 40m but Peter did have a few contacts.

Peter moved to the beach and had some pedestrian mobile contacts at the waterfront much to the bemusement of the simmers.

After a great day in the sun we went to a local restaurant for a lovely meal.

My thanks to Peter for his hospitality and it was great to catch up with old friends from Melbourne. QRP by the bay is a great idea that could be replicated in other locations. Peter has made a video about running this sort of event.

Thanks also for the gift packs containing ceramic resonators on 4.92Mhz and 7.20Mhz, the former useful for Peter's VFO stability mod for Bitx40's and the latter for 40m oscillators.