PTOTA Activations

1 January 2023: Congratulations to all the activators and chasers for 2022. See the final results at https://www.sarcnet.org/ptota.html#Results. We would especially like to thank the 2022 PTOTA Activation Winner, Joe VK3TET, for his assistance in promoting the program. The log has now been reset and we are ready for another year. Happy PTOTAing. Toot-toot, beep-beep, ding-ding and splash-splash from Julie and Joe.

On Saturday 3 December 2022, we traveled by train to Chelsea station on the Frankston line. We were able to log several stations for PTOTA on the way. We then setup our HF station nearby at Victory Park on Chelsea beach and logged some more PTOTA contacts. We used Julie's go-box consisting of an Elecraft KX3, 12Ah LiFePo4 battery and an amplified speaker, together with our 40/20m Inverted-V Fan-Dipole antenna, supported by a 12m carbon-fiber telescopic mast. We attended Peter VK3YE's "QRP By The Bay" event. It was a good turnout on quite a hot day. We caught up with Joe VK3TET for the first time in person. Joe has been a great supporter of PTOTA. During the event, we Zoomed into the Amateur Radio Victoria Homebrew Group's monthly meeting run by Rob VK3MQ and were able to share some of the Amateur Radio projects between the two groups on Zoom. Afterwards we stopped for a nice dinner and great conversation at a nearby Peruvian restaurant. A great day was had by all! The trip back on the train at night was quite entertaining with several, slightly inebriated, ladies singing Christmas carols in Spanish. We arrived home and put our batteries on charge for our next PTOTA expedition.

On Friday 11 November 2022, we did our first PTOTA activation on the Pakenham line train. We left home in the morning with a Yaesu FT-60R VHF/UHF handheld radio and a Codan 2110 HF manpack radio. We made sure our batteries and PT MyKi cards were sufficiently charged the night before. We contacted several chasers via the VK3RCC, VK3RSE and VK3RHF repeaters while walking to and from the station and travelling on the train. We discovered that we were missing a number of new repeaters channels and made a mental note to use the reapeaterbook website to update the programming of the handheld VHF/UHF radio for next time. We got off the train at the end of the line: Pakenham station. We set up our HF radio in a nearby playground and made quite a few contacts further afield. There were some take-away shops nearby, so we had a nice lunch at a picnic table in the playground while operating. Several people stopped to ask us what we were doing and we introduced then to Amateur Radio. We continued to operate most of the afternoon. Then we traveled home by train, making more contacts on the way. When we got home we both agreed that we had an absolutely wonderful time with Amateur Radio making our journey so much more enjoyable. So this was the start of our PTOTA experience, with many more to come we hoped.