A third station, called OTAMA
There is a third remote station in planning. The radio is bought, the site is not chosen, and nothing about IKARA changes. This is mostly so that people who use this one know what the name is when it turns up.
For regular users of IKARA and its KiwiSDR. Short version: nothing to do, and nothing here changes.
It has its own page at otama.vk1hf.com if you want the detail. What follows is the part that is relevant from here.
What it is
The same idea as this station. A receiver and an antenna put somewhere electrically quiet, with the operator at home reaching it over the internet. IKARA at Spring Range and ALAMO at Graford in Texas both work that way already. OTAMA is a third, and the first one to be built as a production site from the start rather than as an experiment that grew into one.
The name is HMAS Otama, an Oberon-class submarine fitted out to listen. She spent the Cold War doing it and was scrapped in 2022.
What is settled, and what is not
| Transceiver | FlexRadio Aurora 510 — bought |
|---|---|
| HF antenna | DX Commander Signature 9, nine-band vertical |
| Wideband RX | KiwiSDR 2, 0–30 MHz, public |
| Power | Mains — no solar, no battery bank |
| Uplink | Starlink Mini |
| Site computer | Raspberry Pi 3B+ |
| Location | Not chosen — aiming within about 90 minutes of Canberra |
The land is the one genuinely open question. Everything else is more or less the fit-out the other two sites arrived at, and it runs the same underlying software as this one, so there is not a great deal to invent.
What it means for IKARA
For now, nothing. This station keeps running exactly as it does, on the same solar and the same Starlink, with the same KiwiSDR. Two things are worth knowing, though.
The first is that OTAMA will eventually have its own public KiwiSDR, which means a second receiver on a different patch of ground to compare against. That is some way off — there is no site yet.
The second is more practical. OTAMA will start out sharing the same exit node that this website and the SDR proxy already run on, before it gets one of its own in the same data centre. That is a deliberately temporary arrangement: a production site should not be able to have a bad day at another station's expense. It is worth knowing in case anything here looks odd during that period.
If you have a quiet paddock
The site is still open, and the ask is small: a few square metres in a corner of a paddock within about ninety minutes of Canberra, with nothing dug in and nothing registered on your title. The page for landholders sets out plainly what it is and what it is not.
OTAMA — the full page →