About Me

G'day, the name this way is Dave.

I'm based in Ballarat, Victoria in VK land.

I'm a Foundation licensed amateur, so I know little about what I'm doing and nothing I say should be taken as based on good experience or education (though I do try). 

I'm a professional IT guy; I'm a senior systems administrator. I deal with bare metal, VMware and Linux. Yes, I even use it at home (though not on everything). 

As a kid I was into electronics. I loved the Dick Smith Funway into Electronics books, and actually getting to go into town to an electronics store for a while was a bit like meeting rock stars.  I never really understood the electronics as much as I knew that I could wire up a light switch between a dash light cluster and a car battery and string them around my "cubby-cum-workshop" and I'd have light. I could wire an old tape deck up and play music. You get the idea. 

Computers at home become a thing, and the electronics vanished into the background. I discovered guitars too, so other than some dodgy fuse repairs, using tape decks as guitar amplifiers, it all started to drift away. 

As I left school and became a computer tech, I found useful applications for the limited electronics knowledge I had. I found I had some advantages over fellow techs who knew computers but had no electronics experience (which was about half of them). 

I become keen on Amateur Radio in 2016. My son was freshly baked, and my nights were spent bleary eyed having cuddles and trying to find things to keep my mind occupied while I couldn't sleep after the 1-2 hourly wake ups. I put some effort into studying for the Foundation exam, having most of the theory sorted out but oblivious to the practical side. After a few months the tiredness set in, and the interest dropped. 

Along come COVID-19 in 2020, and with that working from home. I heard about SDR and the idea of using SSTV to capture images from the ISS. That was a rabbit hole I started down that very quickly turned into antennas going up, transceivers being purchased and me studying for the Foundation exam again. 

The study was easy enough, though I put in a lot of effort to ensure I was successful. A local ham was developing resources for training, so I had plenty of additional material to test myself against. 

The biggest issues were getting the exam done - once I found the right place, I was able to arrange this online and knock it off quickly. 

Unfortunately my timing coincided with changes to the rules for callsigns in Australia, and the AMC being tasked with handling a massive number of callsign change requests whilst dealing with an increased number of exam assessments. We'll call this The Great AMC Debacle of 2020 and move on. 

My late August exam turned into a end of October license. so it took awhile. By the time I received my license I had a couple of antennas and 4 transceivers. 

That leads us to here. A website run by a 2020 minted ham - an F call in disguise, who has a tendency of not posting updates for months. 

Chances are that I have a radio sitting on FT8 and another monitoring the SSTV frequencies right now. I'm rarely on U/VHF beyond listening to the local repeater in the car or during an ISS event - HF seems to be more appealing.

Thanks for reading.