Remote HF station · VK1HF · NSW / ACT
A third remote station, and the first one built as a production site from the outset rather than as an experiment that grew. Named for a submarine that spent its life listening, but when it came up to deliver it really delivered.
Image © FlexRadio Systems.
What this is
Amateur radio needs two things a city cannot give you: an aerial with room around it, and an absence of electrical noise. Every solar inverter, LED globe and phone charger in a suburb adds to a hiss that buries the weak signals worth hearing. So the station goes where the noise is not, and the operator stays at home and reaches it over the internet.
Two of these already run. IKARA sits in a paddock at Spring Range, north of Canberra. ALAMO is at Graford in Texas, operated by K5YZW from Fort Worth. Between them they have settled the hard questions — how to power it, how to reach it, how to know what it is doing when nobody is standing next to it.
OTAMA is where that stops being an experiment. IKARA and ALAMO proved the concept; this one gets built the way the answer came out, from the first day, with mains power and a site chosen on merit rather than on whatever was available.
It is also the big gun of the three. IKARA and ALAMO run a hundred watts. The Aurora 510 runs five hundred — into nine bands of DX Commander, from a place with no noise floor to fight. This is the one built to be heard.
The plan
Nothing here is speculative hardware. The radio is bought. The rest is the standard fit‑out the other two sites arrived at.
The one genuinely open question is the land. If you have a quiet corner of a paddock within an hour and a half of Canberra, the page for landholders explains exactly what this is and what it is not — in plain English, and with nothing hidden in it.
How it is built
OTAMA is not written from scratch. It runs RS1.core, the remote-station framework behind IKARA and ALAMO: a small, boring, documented core that handles the parts every remote site needs, with everything else added as a module.
The module register lists them all. OTAMA expects to run roughly this set:
One module the other sites need will not be
here: there is no rs1-victron-power, because the site runs on
mains and has no solar controller to watch.
What OTAMA adds is its own interface, OTAMApi, and its
own exit node in the AWS Sydney data centre, sitting
alongside ikara-exit-node. A site behind Starlink has no inbound
address, so the exit node is the fixed point the station dials out to and the
operator dials in to. Sharing IKARA's works and is how this will start —
but a production site gets its own, so one station's bad day cannot become
the other's.
Meanwhile
HMAS Otama was one of two Oberon-class "mystery boats", fitted to listen. She spent the Cold War doing it, and was scrapped in 2022.
02 — The landA quiet corner of a paddock, a few square metres, nothing dug in and nothing on your title. Exactly what it is and what it isn't.
03 — The lookNavy winter dress: a jacket that reads as black, a white shirt and gold braid. Plus three alternates, including rig for red.
04 — See it workingThe one already running at Spring Range, with live telemetry, a station log and a gallery of the build.
The submariner's badge. Earned by people who went; borrowed here by someone who did not.