VK Logger Ham Radio Forum Archive

I wonder if this is going to show the yachts in the Sydney Hobart and or the the Melbourne Hobart races?

Some may be a bit cagey as to exactly where they are and what progress there making I guess.

VK3AIF wrote:I wonder if this is going to show the yachts in the Sydney Hobart and or the the Melbourne Hobart races?

Some may be a bit cagey as to exactly where they are and what progress there making I guess.

I think they do. You can usually log onto the race webpage and see where every yacht is so they all know anyhow where each other is. Whether they tell with AIS or some other form of tracking I don't know but secrecy is not a concern.

http://rolexsydneyhobart.com/yacht_tracker.asp

will be interesting to see if they do show up on AIS.

A very interesting past 3 hour map from a station located near Bairnsdale VIC.
Current past hour max distance out to almost 1200 Km. Distant ships located SW of Port Lincoln SA. If your not used to looking at these maps, basically usually from center of Port Phillip Bay to the west is not covered, a lot of all the other spots would not be there either, so you can see the condx are up quite considerably in the Bass Strait at the moment.
Pitty I dont think there are any SSB 2m operators near Port Lincoln

EDIT- Keep in mind that both station would be using omni directional vertical antennas, and the transmission is only 12W FM.

VK6ADF wrote:

VK3AIF wrote:I wonder if this is going to show the yachts in the Sydney Hobart and or the the Melbourne Hobart races?

Some may be a bit cagey as to exactly where they are and what progress there making I guess.

I think they do. You can usually log onto the race webpage and see where every yacht is so they all know anyhow where each other is. Whether they tell with AIS or some other form of tracking I don't know but secrecy is not a concern.

http://rolexsydneyhobart.com/yacht_tracker.asp

will be interesting to see if they do show up on AIS.

Looks like my question is answered, some show up and seem to be making good progress.

VK3JTM, Tim, I notice your AIS station has been online for the past few days, but no spots showing up. Any ideas as to whats happening there?

I think they have been using different tracking stuff and will not be visible on AIS web pages.They use some other tracking solutions.Maybe, a few could show up if they have AIS transpoder installed.Number of yachts with AIS transpoders installed are growing every year although it is not compulsory for those size of boats.

This afternoon, VK6APK and VK6ADF in SW VK6 are hearing a ship out 2200 Km NW toward Cocos Island.
Both VK stations running omni vertical antennas, VK6ADF in particular about at roof height.
A lot of this is demonstrating that 'height is NOT might' when it comes to Tropo. You need to be under the surface layer to have the signal trapped, under surface duct conditions. Different if the layers are elevated of course. May be a slight discrepancy in the distance to VK6ADF as he is not uploading to Marine Traffic, but its not much. Sorry Phil.

11.15pm and Phil VK5AKK has logged a AIS spot for a moored ship at Esperance, approx 1600 Km
Not all received spots get logged on Marine Traffic.com I have found, so there may well be others further out that haven't gotten into the system yet.

Hows this from station 662 Port Lincoln this morning, some spots west of Perth 2107 Km.

Here are the results from yesterday afternoon I think it was, from 3 stations around Bass Strait running AIS.
All 3 stations managed to receive 12W omni signals from Ships just to the SW of Albany WA.

VK7JH Near Burnie TAS - Station 695 Port Albert VIC - Station 106 Geelong VIC -

For anyone interested, Phil VK6ADF QTH at Bunbury is now sending AIS propagation data to Marine Traffic .com.

You can view Phils stats page here -
http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/statio ... eader=true

Here is something else interesting to keep you all excited. I've been studying a few AIS stats pages from today and found 2 that hold some interesting data which will be revealed tomorrow.

This stats page is from Darwin station 831, taken this evening. I have highlighted 2 spikes in the distance graph, which would appear to me that would most probably be caused by Sporadic E. The reason I say this is due to the low background tropo distance of only about 20 nautical miles, which then suddenly jumped to roughly 1200 nautical miles (2200 Km). Firstly about 0500 utc then about 0800 utc.
I cant wait to see where these spots end up being. Will have to wait till the 24 hour map is updated tomorrow to find out. Stay tuned!

Alrighty, here we go.
Confirmation of Sporadic E skip up to 162 MHz out of Darwin yesterday afternoon.
Attached is the map showing the various signal from Ships received around Malaysia and Indonesian areas.
I have also just spoken to Mark VK8MS on 6m, who confirmed with me, even before I asked, that he was hearing 2m sporadic E from the same areas late yesterday afternoon at the same time.

Station 106 Geelong 162 MHz Sporadic E info VK4 coastal waters. Approx 2065 Km max that I am aware off.
This is from afternoon of 31.12.11.

Here is a lone 162 MHz E spot from VK4FGB's station in Cairns yesterday.

Today I received 5 ships via sporadic E. Time from between 0240 UTC and 0305 UTC.
Max distance was 1861 Km and minimum was 904 Km. My yagi is beaming at Melbourne.

By the way the numbers listed beside each ship on this map are the ships MMSI. Which as far as im aware stands for Maritime Mobile Ship Identifier.
If you wanted to you can look up what each ships name and other details are on certain marine sites, like marine traffic.com.

I usually add the name manually unless ship's name show up .Lot of users were complaining about faulty " Auto lookup" button in shipploter software. Mine doesn't work too.

Excellent tropo condx into the Melbourne area and out to sea this morning. Over 5078 signals received so far at 6.52am since about 1am.
Maximum distance is around 700 Km to the west of King Island.
Anywhere west of Melbourne along the VK3 coast I am able to pick up where stations in Melbourne or Tasmania cant.
Huge amounts of signals from Port Phillip Bay and Melbourne docklands, which I find is quite amazing.
As yet, my antenna is only fixed beaming Melbourne direction, so I cant wait to see what will happen when I can actually rotate the antenna and scan along the coastline further west.
By the way there is no wind at all here this morning and 70% humidity. Ive looked at the 2m beacons which are at normal levels.

This screen shot is just a snap shot in time, so of the 5000 spots you only see the current snap shot:

Slightly better looking map here now, with one spot just come in south of Mt Gambier.