Preparing for Sydney To Hobart HF Comms Coverage

Hello All,

I've been a little quiet this year in regards to my Shortwave hobby, however with the up coming Sydney To Hobart Yacht Race 2011 (http://rolexsydneyhobart.com/) and my tradition of trying to provide a broadcast coverage of the HF Comms, what better reason to blow the dust of the radios and fire them up :).

I'm still located in Brisbane Qld, so as we all know that the coverage of the comms can be a little hit and miss. Even if I do have clear reception I'm plaqued with the following two sources of QRM

• I've got an issue with a broadband burst of static that has a pattern of 12sec of static (loud s9+) every ~60sec.  This appears to occur between 09:15 - 15:15 AEDST (08:15 - 14:15 AEST). It shouldn't impact the main Race Position reporting Skeds, but never the less pain the the backside if you just want to tune in and monitor the comms.

•  Our friendly interference from the clandestine Shortwave Station (Voice of People-Korea) that transmits on 6518khz which is also being blocked by a jamming station which just causing an god aweful of frequency wobble. This normally starts / fades in from ~1915 AEDST and lasts till it fades out 0700 AEDST (1815-0600 AEST).

Previously I have been using "ustream.tv - http://www.ustream.tv/channel/sydney-hobart-yacht-race---hf-comms-6516--4483-kh" and while it is a fantastic service each time you attempt to view a saved recording or list on to listen to my feed you forced to watch a 30sec advertisement.  Now while that might not seem to bad, I thought why not try and see what else is on offer....  So this year I'm going to trial a different technology to broadcast the HF Comms audio.  I'm going to use "ShoutCast"  and a free hosting service "Listen To My Radio".

My feeds web page is: http://s2h.listen2myradio.com/ and the players on this page also point to the current server which has been allocated to me after I might stop / start my ShoutCast Service.

However I've embedded the player as follows to see if it will work, but its based on the link provided by shoutCat Yellow Pages.




Currently I've got feed monitoring 6516 khz for the pre-race radio checks which needs to be completed by the yachts before they compete.  The radio checks are schedule to ran from Dec 15th 2011 - Dec 22nd 2011. Lets see how the ShoutCast feed goes, worse case if it pans out to be too unreliable, I'll switch back to "ustream.tv" and we'll need to put up with 30sec adverts .