A lady visitor to the area approached Rob ZL4ROB for information regarding the MP building. Turns out she hosted a program, called Kia Ora Brazil, on a Hamilton community radio station. Rob roped Dave ZL1DL into telling the story, which to his chagrin was recorded and advised would be material for the visitors radio program.
After that interesting distraction, it was off to the park to try Winlink on HF as a portable setup. Initially, Rob strung an endfed on 40m, at about 2m above ground level. Communication with ZL1AOX’s RMS proved difficult, so Rob’s portable pole was used to elevate the center of the endfed. Data rate was a little better but not great, so changed to ZL2SEA’s RMS and data then flew. So a useful demonstration on HF propagation: shorter distances are not necessarily better!
Later, over coffee, Dave mentioned that there was a firmware fork for the Quansheng UV-K5 series, based on egzumer 0.22. It appears egzumer is not being developed further, at this stage, and so F4HWN 2.8.1 has been released with a number of interesting developments over egzumer. Dave, Rob and John ZL1OJ flashed their radios to the new firmware and had a play. One addition is the ability to control the RF power level for the low power setting. So with radios set to <20mW, we did some checks (without walking too far) and found good strength at such QRP. Could be interesting to see what sort of distance records can be achieved at such power levels.