Complete, turn-key remote HF communications systems. Not a radio in a box — power, antenna, link, control and telemetry engineered together, delivered on air, and owned outright. All prices in Australian dollars (AUD).
The full station, operated entirely from SmartSDR on Windows, macOS or iOS. No console required.
| Radio | FlexRadio 8400 + 8400 ATU |
|---|---|
| Antenna | DX Commander, multi-band |
| Power | Victron 100/30, 300 Ah LiFePO₄, 3 × 250 W solar |
| Link | Starlink Mini |
| Outright | A$12,225 + A$279/month |
Everything in the RS1, plus the FlexRadio Maestro C console — knobs, dials and a full-colour touch display for operators who want a real front panel.
| Radio | FlexRadio 8400 + 8400 ATU |
|---|---|
| Console | FlexRadio Maestro C, 3rd Gen |
| Power | Victron 100/30, 300 Ah LiFePO₄, 3 × 250 W solar |
| Link | Starlink Mini |
| Outright | A$15,525 + A$279/month |
Two remote stations in service on opposite sides of the world, both fully documented in public — the build, the failures and the telemetry. This is where the Remote Station range came from.
They are also the two reference sites. Anyone who joins follows one of these templates depending on their own situation: whether you have mains power and a building, or a bare paddock and nothing else. Same outcome — a full-size station in a quiet place that you operate from anywhere. Very different realities getting there.
No mains, no building, no services. A self-contained comms trailer sitting in an empty paddock that generates, stores and manages all of its own power — solar, battery and a charge controller it has to nurse through winter. Radio, tuner, SDR receivers, weather and full telemetry, all remotely operated and published live.
This is the template if your site is bare ground.
ikara.vk1hf.com →A Flex 6700 in a shed on a working ranch, on full mains AC from the grid — so no solar, no batteries and no power budget to manage. Operated from an apartment seventy miles away in Fort Worth. Built with Ed, K5YZW.
This is the template if your site has power and a roof.
alamo.k5yzw.com →For all the romance of a station in an empty paddock or a shed on a working ranch, it is not all beer and skittles. The sites are remote by definition. Things fail when nobody is standing next to them, dust and weather get into everything, and some faults take months to chase down. IKARA is still living with radio noise from its own solar charge controller, and ALAMO’s worst interference turned out to be a shed fan — which took real detective work to find.
We would not swap it. We love how they work, and we love working on them. But an honest picture is more useful to anyone thinking of doing this than a brochure is, so we keep a situation report for each site — what is running, what is not, and what is planned next.
Like what we are building? The mailing list is where a new site, a new module or a hard-won lesson gets written up first — usually before it reaches these pages.
We keep it quiet on purpose. Something goes out when there is genuinely something worth saying, and not otherwise. No newsletter for the sake of a newsletter.
Join the mailing list →Subscribing is a blank email to
1zulu-rs1+subscribe@groups.io — it runs on groups.io, and you can
leave the same way whenever you like.
Trade-qualified Radio Fitter/Mechanic, ACMA Radio callsign VK1HF. HF through microwave, microprocessor and embedded design, IoT and telemetry, Linux and Raspberry Pi, solar and battery power.
I thrive on mission-critical engineering and specialise in it — systems that have to keep working unattended, a long way from anyone who could reach out and restart them. That is a discipline, not a hobby, and it is the same one that underwrites the professional work.
For all RS1 and RS1M sales or technical questions.
ian@iangilchrist.net