I joined Graeme VK3CDO and we spent a very pleasant afternoon, night and breakfast at the Barmah Lakes campground near Echuca. As usual, Graeme came well equipped for the field operations.
There are fireplaces with a metal ring resting on a concrete base but oddly they had signs saying not to use them until a safety audit had been completed. A group of three rangers turned up and I asked what the danger was? They said that there had been two reports of the concrete base exploading and they were checking them all to try to figure out what would cause that.
An end fed antenna was strung up and we had several contacts including to a POTA station in NSW and Richard VK3LRJ. Noise was very low of course.
The KX3 was matched beautifully to the end fed using a home brew Unun but the band seemed rather dead. Connecting the end fed direct to the radio brought the band to life and the KX3’s amazing tuner was able to get a good enough match on its own. Something is wrong with the Unun.
I powered the radio with a 12V adapter connected to a Makita battery. This works well and doesn’t seem to add any noticable noise.
Lindsay VK3GX kindly loaned us a new Starlink Mini station to provide high speed internet.
Unfortunately the trees blocked too much of the sky and the Starlink dish was unable to find enough satellites. These Starlink Minis draw only 36W and could be run for many hours on a small power bank.
It was a very warm afternoon with rain on the way which happily fell once we had packed up after dinner and were in our tents.
Barmah Lakes is a lovely spot and on the Friday night a few other campers arrived some with boats of various sorts.
There were some annoying flies in the afternoon and a few mosquitoes but the overnight sleep in our tents was very pleasant with a fair amount of rain which ended before breakfast.
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