Everything you need before you put a signal out from IKARA, on one page: whether the station is healthy enough to transmit, whether the solar charger is going to sit on the bands, and how to get connected.
IKARA is a remote station north of Canberra, running off a battery and solar. If VK1HF has given you access to operate it, sign in with your callsign and your six‑digit PIN.
Access to IKARA is full operator access to the radio itself — the same access VK1HF has. This is not a sandboxed web toy. You are keying a real transmitter, into a real antenna, on a licence and a site that belongs to somebody else.
Treat it exactly as you would treat sitting down in another amateur’s shack while he is out: leave it as you found it, do not change what you did not come to change, and if something looks wrong, say so rather than work around it.
Sign-in takes two things: your callsign and your PIN. The authenticator code is not being asked for at the moment.
VK1HF issues your PIN. Lost it? He can set a new one. Two‑factor sign-in is temporarily disabled — if it is switched back on, a code box will appear here and VK1HF will send you a QR code to scan.
Station state
CHECKING
Reading the station’s telemetry…
Battery
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Charge current
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Solar charger
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Radio
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IKARA runs the v3 firmware line. FlexRadio expects your SmartSDR client to match the radio, so install a 3.x client, not a v4 one — a v4 client will offer to upgrade the radio’s firmware, which you should never accept.
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CW over a remote link cannot carry your key’s timing, so the keying has to happen at the radio end. Two ways in:
IKARA licenses two operator positions at once (FlexRadio calls this MultiFlex). Two people can be on it together, each with their own slice and panadapter. A third cannot connect until one of the two leaves.
From a Maestro: Menu → Radio → Switch Radio, then exit to the Info / Operate / SmartLink Setup screen, where a fourth option, Disconnect, lets you drop another client.
Do check who it is before you cut them off — the station name is shown in the disconnect dialog, and it may well be VK1HF mid‑QSO.
The solar charge controller is the main noise source at IKARA. The harder it is charging, the more hash you will hear — which is why charge current is on this page. Under about 1 A it is generally not worth worrying about; over about 5 A you will notice it on the quieter bands.
You can switch it off yourself for a while from the QRM eliminator, using the same callsign you signed in with here (it has its own PIN — ask VK1HF). Holds are 15, 30 or 60 minutes, capped at 90 minutes a day across everyone, and the charger puts itself back on automatically at the end.
It will refuse if the battery is low or if there is no sun worth speaking of. That is deliberate: muting the charger costs the battery, and the battery is the station.