IKARA · Station Log VK1HF
12 September 2026

A line over the big tree

A long Saturday afternoon at Spring Range. A drone put a support line over the tall gum, a second SDR went into the cabinet and refused to speak to anybody, and the weather station admitted it had been reporting the wind backwards.

A working visit rather than a theme. If you like reading about what actually happens on a site day — including the part that did not work — this is that.

Site days are not like working on the station from the kitchen table. You get a finite number of daylight hours, you can only fix what you brought the parts for, and everything you do not finish becomes a note for next time. This was a full afternoon and it produced one genuinely good result, several quiet ones, and one problem that is still sitting out there in the dark.

The Ikara site late on 12 September 2026 — the big gum on the left with the new high line running from it, the DX Commander vertical and weather station on the trailer, and the three solar panels angled to the sun.
Spring Range, late afternoon, 12 September 2026. The high line runs from the big gum across to the right of frame; the DX Commander is up on the trailer beside the weather station. More in the gallery.

The line over the tree

The best thing to come out of the day was also the least electrical. A high line now runs over the top of the big tree, which gives the station a high mount to the east for the first time.

That was flown by Greg Sheedy — Sheeds — who put the line over the top with a drone. Getting a line over a tree that size by any traditional method is a long afternoon of catapults, fishing line and swearing, and it very often ends with the line somewhere you did not want it. A drone turns it into a few minutes of careful flying. Thanks Sheeds.

Nothing is hanging off it yet. That is deliberate — the point of the afternoon was to get the support in place while there was time and still air to do it properly. Having it there changes what is possible: an east-facing high point is the difference between what can be strung up in an afternoon and what needs a working bee. It will get used soon.

The DX Commander also went up, but let us be honest about that one. It is mounted where it was convenient rather than where it should live, and it looks a great deal more impressive than it is — largely because it is not actually being used. All that has happened so far is that it has been physically put up. It is a starting point, and it will move.

Two sensors in the cabinet

A vibration and tamper sensor now sits in the IKARA cabinet, and a second sensor went in alongside it. Between them the cabinet can now report not just how warm and humid it is, but whether anything has touched it.

That matters more at a remote site than it does at home. The cabinet is an hour of driving away and out of sight. Knowing the temperature inside it is useful; knowing that something moved it at three in the morning is a different category of useful altogether.

The 360 camera

The 4K 360° camera is configured and working a treat. It is a genuinely satisfying addition — being able to look around the site properly, rather than at whatever a fixed lens happened to be pointed at, makes remote troubleshooting far less of a guessing game.

The genuinely important part

A custom Jetboil and brew holder, designed and 3D printed, now sits on the back corner of the trailer. This is not a joke entry. A site visit is several hours of standing in a paddock doing fiddly work with cold hands, and having somewhere solid to put the stove and a cup — rather than balancing both on the drawbar and hoping — improves the experience of the whole day out of proportion to the effort of making it.

The SDR that would not speak

The second KiwiSDR went into the cabinet, powered up, cabled to the network — and never appeared. Not a wrong address, not a firewall problem. Nothing. Over an eight-minute packet capture on the cabinet network, the only two devices that said anything at all were the site Pi and the first KiwiSDR.

Chasing it turned up something genuinely worth knowing, though. Neither KiwiSDR identifies itself on the network by its hardware address. Both send a software identifier instead, and those identifiers are byte-for-byte identical — two different boards, two different hardware addresses, one shared identity baked into the BeagleBone image they were both built from.

To the DHCP server that makes them the same device. The reservation that was supposed to hand the second Kiwi its own address could never match, and the two units would simply have fought over one lease. The site log had been quietly complaining about exactly this every five minutes for weeks, in a line nobody had reason to read closely.

That is now fixed — the DHCP server has been told to ignore those software identifiers and go by hardware address, which is what the configuration always assumed it was doing. So the address is waiting. The remaining problem is simpler and more stubborn: the unit is not transmitting at all, which means power, cable, or a board that is not booting. It needs a reboot and a proper look, and that is a next-visit job.

Small corrections

The weather station has been reporting the wind direction 180° out. It is now corrected. A wind vane that is confidently wrong is worse than no wind vane, because you believe it — and a north-westerly reading as a south-easterly will happily mislead you about a front coming through for months before anybody notices.

The solar panel is properly secured at last. That one had been carried over from the previous visit for want of nothing more exotic than a handful of small stakes from Bunnings — which is precisely the sort of part you discover you are missing when you are an hour from the nearest shop and it is getting dark.

Behind the scenes

Away from the site, a good deal of work went into the IKARA admin panels. Less visible than an antenna, but the admin side is where a remote station is actually operated from, and it has needed the attention.

What changed

Next visit

Station telemetry — ikara.vk1hf.com/stats →
IKARA · VK1HF · Spring Range