|
 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 (which
predates the Christchurch quake) ...
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, about 20km
East of me, was devastated by a severe quake in
1931 and almost totally rebuilt in the extant Art
Deco style, much of which has survived until
today. A similarly powerful quake occurred in July
2009 just off South Island, moving ZL about 30
cms closer to VK and three more huge quakes in
Christchurch in 2010/2011 caused death and
destruction in ZL3-land.
You can easily make out three major SW/NE fault
lines running through North Island on the map,
while South Island is basically a mountain range
thrown up by the colliding plates.
Our latitude 39o30’22” (=39.5061o) South by
longitude 176o38’48” (=176.6466o) East puts us
in Maidenhead locator square
RF80HL
.
Here’s the satellite image of our place on Google Earth:
Our place is the clearing that looks a bit like a giant telephone handset 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 shows the
route of 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 of our 20 acres 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
impossible to walk up or down 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 ...
20 acres leaves 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 a few radials and some wire fencing laid out beneath, it works OK, for now.
This hilltop QTH has a “good views”, meaning 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:
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. The short path to EU flies right 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.
The red circle on the great circle map above shows the edge of our hemisphere: everything outside
the circle is on the Far Side of the Earth from us. An even more dramatic image (courtesy of Bill
ZL3NB) shows how our side of the globe might look from space:
Oh boy, what a lot of water! There are very few hams on our side of the globe apart from ZL, VK,
YB, DU, KH6, the Southern tip of CE and LU, and JA disappearing over the edge. The Americas and
Asia are 10-15,000 km away while Europe and Africa are 15-20,000 km away, all of them on the
Far Side. Few of those little specks in the Pacific have active hams. In other words, almost all of
our QSOs qualify as DX. This makes it tough going for Oceania hams to reach the top of various DX leagues, the CQ DX Marathon or the DXCC Honor Roll, but it doesn’t stop us trying!
|
