My ' Ham Shack in the Bush ' is located on our 450 acres of ' Mallee ' country which is near a town called Morgan, about 150 kilometres north east of Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia ( VK5 )... We live in Adelaide, but every few weeks or so, we come up here to get away from the city for a while and to get on the radio... Since there is no available electricity supply, we're using ' Solar Power '... At present we have a 20 by 35 foot colorbond shed with a concrete floor, gas stove and fridge and the usual comforts... Being in the ' Middle of Nowhere ' here, we don't have any problems with Power Line Interference like you do in the cities nowadays... The background noise level is ' Strength Zero ' on the radios which are an IC-7600 and an FT-450... I operate mainly CW and also the digital modes for which I use a Dell Laptop computer running the MixW software...




It's charged by the energy from the Sun via an 80 watt solar panel up on the roof of the shed...

The Solar Controller automatically regulates the current going from the solar panel to the battery... See 'Solar Power' article under 'Cubex Quad'...

The Icom IC-7600 is an excellent radio...

The Yaesu FT-450 is also a good radio...

One of the antennas in use here is a 6 Band, HF ground plane using the Hustler 6BTV vertical with 2 radials per band... It's up on a pole at a height of 7 metres...

The other antenna is a 2 element, 5 band, HF Cubex Quad at a height of 10 metres...

This Amateur Radio Station - VK5SW - is ' Run by the Sun '...

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