So I’ve had my 7300 deployed remotely for 17 days so fay. It hasn’t missed a beat yet and the wfview software has been running the whole time on the rpi3b without me ever needing to do a restart of ir or reboot. It is located about 3km from me and down here it’s a major issue to get to it. I am going to retrieve it today as the antennas I’m using are faulty and we can’t repair them(150m long, 45m high sloping vees) but I just thought I’d take the opportunity to congratulate the team on a fantastic bit of software.
This is by far the coolest thing I have seen today. Wow! What a photo! That’s some serious antenna aperture too, 150 meters long! How’s the HF down there, what areas of the world do you often hear?
I hope you get your antenna system back up and running soon. We have SWR in the latest version, but only debug builds will show it because I have a font issue I am working out with the meter text.
Let us know if you run into any problems. This is so exciting, you’ve made my day!
G’Day Elliot.
The antennas are damaged at the tops of the masts where the open wire feedline connects to the elements. We have 6 of these large antennas which when modelled in software show around 11dBi gain each. 2 point to Australia, 2 point to Mawson Station and 2 point towards McMurdo.
So far using a $60k VNA they all look okay but just don’t radiate well. I can actually see the damage and we can’t fix it for now. I will be going back to my dipole which has got me as far as Alaska, South Africa, USA and Italy with 400W SSB. I have a nice low noise floor here most of the time which really helps. I have worked a station in Australia, about 4000km away and he was using a handheld radio with a telescopic whip on the 20m band with 1.7W and I got him at about a 3x4 down here.
The radio will still be able to be operated remotely but is just down the road from my living quarters. So stoked with the software so far, looking forward to how it progresses over time.
