I live in Canberra city, in what is technically a unit by definition. I do not have much room, and I share common walls with my neighbours.
I love it here. That is the part people expect me to complain about, and I am not going to.
But I grew up on a farm and I used to live on one, and there are two things a farm gives a radio operator that a unit never will: space for antennas, and the quiet that only the country brings. No solar charge controllers. No inverters. No cheap switch-mode supplies buzzing across the low bands from three dwellings away. Just a noise floor low enough to hear what is actually there.
Every time my wife and I are out and about, I am looking at properties. Ten quiet acres with a shed and a clear horizon, and I am already running the wire in my head. Let’s buy that.
They never come cheap. And here is the honest part — we do not actually want to move out of Canberra. We love it here. So the daydream is not really about a house at all. It is about a paddock with a low noise floor, and I keep being asked to buy an entire life to get one.
The purchase price is the part everyone quotes. It is not the part that gets you.
None of that is radio. All of it is the price of the antenna field.
Forget the purchase price, the rates, the travel and the mower. Take just the stamp duty — the one-off transfer cost that buys you no land, no building and no antenna — and spend it on a Remote Station instead.
Not a hypothetical. These are calculated from each revenue office’s own published rate schedule, on a $1,200,000 purchase, at the general rate — no first-home or owner-occupier concession, because this is a second property bought for its quiet, not a home you are moving into.
| Where you buy | Stamp duty on A$1.2m | Funds an RS1, plus this long running it |
|---|---|---|
| ACTNon-owner-occupier schedule, 1 Jul 2025 determination | $49,750 | 11.2 years |
| NSWGeneral transfer duty, 2026–27 schedule | $48,187 | 10.7 years |
| VICNon-principal-place-of-residence: flat 5.5% of the whole value | $66,000 | 16.1 years |
| TASProperty transfer duty, over $725,000 | $49,185 | 11.0 years |
| QLDTransfer duty, general rate — no home concession | $49,525 | 11.1 years |
| SAConveyance duty, over $500,000 | $59,830 | 14.2 years |
| WAGeneral rate, over $725,000 | $52,916 | 12.2 years |
That is the spread across the country for one transfer fee. It buys no land, no shed, no tower and no antenna. In Victoria it is 16.1 years of a complete remote station, running, before you have turned a sod.
An RS1 is A$12,225 outright and A$279 a month to run — A$3,348 a year covering link, hosting and site rental. So here is what a given stamp duty bill actually buys, if you point it at radio instead of at a conveyancer.
| Stamp duty you would pay (AUD) | Buys an RS1, plus this long running it | Or an RS1M, plus this long |
|---|---|---|
| $20,000 | 2.3 years | 1.3 years |
| $30,000 | 5.3 years | 4.3 years |
| $40,000 | 8.3 years | 7.3 years |
| $50,000 | 11.3 years | 10.3 years |
State figures are calculated from publicly available data on hand in 2026 — each jurisdiction’s published transfer duty schedule, applied to a $1,200,000 dutiable value at the general rate. No first-home, owner-occupier or pensioner concession is applied, and foreign-buyer surcharges are excluded. Rates are indexed and amended from time to time: confirm against your revenue office before relying on any figure. Sources: ACT · NSW · VIC · TAS · QLD · SA · WA.
The ladder above is illustrative only — the rate depends on the state or territory and the value of the property. Put your own number in the left-hand column; the arithmetic does not change. And remember this compares stamp duty alone against the entire cost of a station.
Australia cannot agree on a name for it, and neither can anywhere else. The label changes at every border. What it does to your bank balance does not.
| Where | What it is called there |
|---|---|
| New South Wales · Queensland · Western Australia | Transfer duty |
| Victoria | Land transfer duty |
| Australian Capital Territory | Conveyance duty |
| Tasmania | Property transfer duty |
| South Australia | Stamp duty |
| England & Northern Ireland | Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) |
| Scotland | Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) |
| Wales | Land Transaction Tax (LTT) |
| New Zealand | None — abolished in 1999 |
New Zealand is the interesting one. Stamp duty on property was abolished there in 1999, so a Kiwi reader can skip the table above entirely. It does not make the argument go away. It moves the friction somewhere else — agent commission, legal fees, finance, the removalists, and the months spent finding a block with a clear horizon and a quiet neighbour.
Because net net, whatever your jurisdiction calls it, this is all the same thing: the friction of transferring property. Money that leaves your account and buys you no land, no building, no tower and no antenna. It is the cost of the transaction itself, not of the thing being transacted.
And duty is only the visible part. All things considered you are also paying agent commission on the sale, conveyancing at both ends, building and pest, loan establishment, the removalist, the disconnections and the reconnections — and the weeks of your life that go into all of it. A remote station has none of that. It has a purchase price, a monthly cost, and an address that never has to change.
Say you do it anyway. You find the place, you pay the duty, you move, you put up the antennas, and for a while it is everything you hoped.
Then a solar farm goes in next door. Or an inverter shed, or a new pivot, or any one of a hundred perfectly legal installations that radiate across HF. The quiet you bought is gone, and there is nothing on your title that protects it. You cannot buy a noise floor. You can only rent one, and your neighbours hold the lease.
A remote station does not have that problem, because it is not welded to a mortgage. If the site goes noisy, the station moves. That is a weekend, not a life event.
The Remote Station range exists because I did this arithmetic on myself and did not like the answer. I did not want to buy a farm. I wanted a quiet paddock with power, a link, and something at the far end that would keep working when nobody was standing next to it.
IKARA and ALAMO are two of those, running today on opposite sides of the world — both fully documented in public, telemetry and failures included. They are not brochures. They are the proof.
The full station, operated from SmartSDR on Windows, macOS or iOS.
Specification & pricing →Everything in the RS1, plus the Maestro C console and a real front panel.
Specification & pricing →Happy to work through the arithmetic for your situation and your site.
ian@iangilchrist.net