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We live about 20km due West of Napier on the
central East coast of New Zealand’s North Island,
a world famous wine-growing region called
Hawke’s Bay - roughly where the red dot is on
this handy ‘recent earthquakes’ map ...
ZL sits astride the junction of two tectonic plates
and hence has some fabulous volcanoes, active
geothermal areas and, as you can see, numerous
earthquakes. The city of Napier was flattened by
a severe quake in the 1930s and almost totally
rebuilt in the extant Art Deco style, much of which
remains today. A similarly powerful quake
occurred in July 2009 just off South Island,
moving ZL about 30 cms closer to VK! You can
easily see three major SW/NE fault lines running
through North Island on the map.
Our latitude 39o30’22” (=39.5061o) South by
longitude 176o38’48” (=176.6466o) East puts us
in Maidenhead locator square
RF80HL
.
The satellite image of our place on Google Maps was finally updated at the end of 2009 to this:
Our place is the clearing that looks a bit like a giant telephone in the forest. The wiggly phone lead
going SSE to the edge of the forest is half of our track to the Taihape road - there’s another 2km
across the open paddocks. The straighter strip going SSW from our plot is a 10kV overhead
power line through the forest, feeding just our house. The white spots in our plot are the house
and shed. The raceway track to the SE of us is a landing strip that is used for the start and finish of
an annual motorbike endurance race through the forest (nutters!).
A close up ‘perspective’ view lacks enough definition to see the tower and beam but at least gives a hint of why I get out so well via long path into Europe (SE from here):
The slope is exaggerated in that view but we really are on a N/S ridge and the paddock to the SE is
hard to walk up without holding on to the fence.
Here’s our house, “Castle Peak”, photographed with a long telephoto lens from a little hill way
across the valley to the SE ...
The 20 acre plot means plenty of space for antennas, though I could really have done with that
passing helicopter to put some strong lines over the tall old pine trees behind the property. That’s
a 12m tower in the photo so I estimate them to be about 25-30m (~100 feet) high.
The tower is not as bent as it appears in this shot! It’s an optical illusion caused by the ladder and
perspective. The fishing pole lashed to a telegraph pole next to the tower is my 40m quarter wave
vertical. With only a few radials laid out, it sort of works.
This hilltop QTH has a good low-angle takeoff in all directions. We can see the clear blue Pacific
ocean in Hawke’s Bay about 15km to our East. I’d like to show you the takeoff but I haven’t
found a decent terrain-mapping program yet that works with available ZL terrain data. I’m
struggling even to find topographical maps showing contour lines in ZL :-(
Best I can do for now is this great circle map circled on Castle Peak, drawn using the neat freeware
program from SM3GSJ and a
hand-modified list of prefixes, trimmed down to leave just a few
common and readable ones:
You’ll see there are really only three major ham populations within 10,000 km (ZL, VK and JA).
The Americas and Asia are 10-15,000 km away while Europe and Africa are 15-20,000 km away
on the Far Side. Our Antipodes are EA and CT so naturally they appear right around the periphery
of the map and it doesn’t seem to matter much which way I beam for them. Short path to EU
goes over JA and tends to be dominated by JAs, so LP openings to EU can be more productive for
DX, although sometimes I enjoy working JA pileups as well.
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