The bigger brother to IKARA.
Remote HF station · VK1HF · Terang, Victoria
A FlexRadio Aurora 510 and a DX Commander Signature 9, in quiet country in Southwest Victoria, operated from anywhere. 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 lives where the noise is not, and the operator stays at home and reaches it over the internet.
OTAMA is the third of these. IKARA sits in a paddock at Spring Range, north of Canberra, and ALAMO is at Graford in Texas, operated by K5YZW from Fort Worth. OTAMA is on air at Terang, in Southwest Victoria, built from the first day on what those two stations learned.
It is also the big gun of the three. IKARA and ALAMO run a hundred watts, into a quiet site and a good deal of patience. OTAMA does not have to be patient.
Transmit power · drawn to scale
Five times the other two, into nine bands of DX Commander, from a place with no noise floor to fight. Mostly it listens. When it does not, it is heard.
The station
How it reaches you
Starlink is the only sensible way to get bandwidth to a quiet rural site, but it puts the site behind shared, carrier-grade NAT. There is no fixed address to dial into and nothing from outside can reach in, which is exactly what a remote Flex radio needs. The usual result is a radio that connects and then shows no panadapter, no waterfall and no audio.
OTAMA solves this with Flexitnode. Rather than fight the NAT, it turns the connection around:
No VPN client to install, no port forwarding, no static IP or dynamic DNS, and no router changes at a site that is hours down the road. Operators log in with SmartLink and the radio is simply there. See its live status →
Photos
Explore
Rig status, how the A510 has been used, the Starlink dish and the link to Sydney, all live.
PhotosThe Aurora 510, the DX Commander Signature 9 and the site at Terang.
RestrictedHealth, tunnel traffic, Starlink and the flex log, for the people who run the station.
The nameHMAS Otama was one of two Oberon-class "mystery boats", fitted to listen. She spent the Cold War doing it, and was scrapped in 2022.
The lookNavy winter dress: a jacket that reads as black, a white shirt and gold braid. Plus three alternates, including rig for red.
The little brotherThe station 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.