**“Inside the Remote Super-Station”
An Interview with Steve Kennedy VK6SJ
with VK1NBC Alderand “Bluey” Smith**
Bluey (VK1NBC):
Steve, mate — thanks for sitting down with me. Now, I’ve been told you don’t advertise enough. Something about Brad giving you grief?
Steve (VK6SJ):
(laughs) Yeah, thanks Brad! We thought we’d better start posting more often. The more people know what we’re doing — and the more the amateur radio community supports us — the better gear we can bring into the country, and at sharper prices. It’s a win-win.
Bluey:
Righto. So let’s jump in. You’ve been quietly building a monster of a remote station with a few mates. Give us the tour.
THE RADIOS
Bluey:
Let’s start with the heart — the radios. You’re a Flex man through and through, yeah?
Steve:
Absolutely. The core is a pair of Flex 6000/8000-series rigs: a Flex-6600 and a Flex-8600, both mounted in a 19-inch rack.
The 6600 runs into a PGXL amplifier.
The 8600 is barefoot on HF, but it feeds a Q5 2-metre transverter that gives us 150 W out on 2 m.
Bluey:
And the 2-metre setup still looks like a Flex in SmartSDR?
Steve:
Exactly — the display shows the final 2 m frequency, panadapter, everything. It feels native.
THE ANTENNA MAGIC: SWITCHING, FILTERS & COMBINERS
Bluey:
Okay, so you’ve got two radios. How do you stop them from blowing each other up?
Steve:
With a lot of help from 4O3A gear.
The PGXL and the 6600 feed into an Antenna Genius 8×2 coaxial switch. From there we distribute across:
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160 m & 80 m wire antennas
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40 m steerable dipole
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TH5DXX tribander
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9-element 6 m yagi (4 elements driven to cover the full band)
Between the switch and each antenna are 4O3A band-pass filters for 160, 80, 40, 20, 15 & 10 m.
Bluey:
And the combiner?
Steve:
Yep. The 10/15/20 filters feed into a 3-band combiner.
That lets us share the TH5 between three bands at once — and even run two radios simultaneously on the same antenna with up to 1 kW each, no interference.
Bluey:
So SO2R with one tribander?
Steve:
Absolutely. Perfectly clean — not even a raised noise floor.
THE “CAN’T DO THAT” RULE
Bluey:
Surely there’s a catch.
Steve:
Just one:
You can’t place both radios on the same band, because we only have one antenna per band.
The Antenna Genius prevents that — it dead-shorts one rig while the other gets the antenna.
Bluey:
Handy for checking your own audio though.
Steve:
Exactly. I sometimes do it intentionally for that reason.
ROTATION & MECHANICALS
Bluey:
Let’s talk about what keeps the aluminum in the air.
Steve:
The main stack is on a 13-metre tilt-over self-supporting tower, raised and lowered by a 4WD winch off 12 V.
Full tower down in under 3 minutes — 5 to 10 minutes if we drop the 80 m dipole first.
Bluey:
Rotators?
Steve:
The primary HF antennas use a Yaesu G-2800 driven by a 4O3A Rotator Genius — two independent graphical web interfaces, fully remote.
Up the smaller mast we’ve got a G-650 on M2 VHF/UHF yagis, controlled via a Green Heron controller (also network-enabled).
NETWORKING, CONTROL, AND CYBER-SANITY
Bluey:
Now this is the bit I love — the IT. Walk us through it.
Steve:
We run a 2015-era server on Linux acting as:
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VPN server
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Soft router
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Remote-management host
We keep the shack on its own separate network from the house. If anyone breaks into the radio network, they can’t touch the house LAN.
The Flex radios can be accessed via:
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VPN, or
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SmartLink
For remote power control we use a web relay switch that lets us reboot Flex radios or cut their 12 V feed via the remote on/off port.
NODE-RED AUTOMATION
Bluey:
You’re running Node-RED on a Victron charger?
Steve:
(laughs) Yeah — why not?
The Victron has an embedded Linux OS, so instead of a Raspberry Pi, we just installed Node-RED there.
We’re using modules built by operators like Dave WO2X, which saved us a ton of time.
Our Node-RED dashboard monitors:
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Antenna switching
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Rotator positions
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Sunspot data
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PGXL amplifier status (to keep us under 400 W)
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Soft & hard resets
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…and some other things we don’t discuss publicly.
THE NEXT BIG UPGRADE
Bluey:
Future plans?
Steve:
Another HF mast down the lower part of the block.
We’ve already got the 13 m guyed tilt-over mast and another G-2800 rotator ready.
That’ll likely carry a TET-Emtron WARC yagi.
We’ll add the appropriate filters and another combiner to the equipment room.
WRAP UP
Bluey:
Steve, this is a seriously impressive remote station—world-class stuff. Anything else for the amateurs reading this?
Steve:
If you’ve got questions, jump in and ask.
And please share — we’re going to be posting a lot more often.
I’ve got a stack of articles already up on the Comtek Radio website:
Bluey:
Cheers Steve — and thanks for the tour of Australia’s most interesting Flex-powered remote station.