Joe Kerr

I’d have to ask th’ missus how I should answer that one! ????

Too late! Had a pet fallow for 20 years so that desires gone to!

Gday right back atcha, from Sandgroper land cobber! in a previous life I badly wanted to hunt tahr & chamois in kiwi land, that was until one day I went to a private zoo over here in South Oz & they had a couple tame tahr that you could pet! That was the end of that dream, they are just a big tame goat with goofy eyes! Doubt I could shoot one now much less hang a head on my wall as a trophy! Guess I’ve gone soft in my old age!

Figured it was probably you! ? Nice time of year to be out and about down there, ewes lambing & foxes out & about, even the tail end of the rut if you can find a deer or two! ??

Hezzy is that you? still building craypots for a living or is it another Hezzy?

Yeah, it's a worry coz those who have found a mob here or there get p!ssy at me when I mention publicly the locations of the various mobs of them.

Plenty deer in WA, just got to know where to look.

Dunno if they will take too kindly to you shooting kiwis with a bow - will they?

Indeed we did, BUT it took a heck of a fight, before they would even admit what had happened with their Meekatharra down link station power outage and lack of fuel etc. What i wonder is, how many thousands of users only tried once or twice and gave up trying if it wasn't urgent?... sure they would only have got charged $3 or $6 & probably paid it and never thought any more of it!. They refunded me the $2K, BUT if they made another $6K from other users who had no idea and all paid say $6each - then they still wound up in front, for the error!. I had to threaten them with the communications ombudsman etc, before they came clean about it all. Pretty typical of how big communications company's deny everything up front & demand payment UNLESS you have iron clad proof and threaten to go public etc.

It's a little different to that actually Grunf, - you see anyone you wish to call usually will be on the earth based land line phone system. So until such time as the satellite can hit a sat phone company earth based downlink station, which then connects you to a persons phone number on that land line system you can't call anyone. If the Sat company's earth based downlink station has no power (or backup generator power) then there's no way to get a connection FROM the satellite back to earth... to then connect to anyone on the land line system. Satellites only work for earth based communications IF you can both "up link" from your sat hand held unit to the Satellite & The Satellite can then also "down link" back to the earth based landline phone system!. One without the other makes the whole system redundant! So if you can't get a signal out to the Sat because your down in a ravine or a cave or have 3 tiered rain forest canopy above you obscuring your view of the sky and a line of sight connection to the Satellite, that's one way it can fail - but equally if the satellite can't connect to a earth based ground station to patch you into the land line phone system then equally you can't call anyone. If the other person your trying to reach however, also had a Sat Phone, which was also in line of sight to the Satellite then yes you could call them because the connection would be direct via the satellite for each phone - it cuts out the involvement of a ground receiving station and the earth based land line system. Hope that makes sense.

You might be better off with a satellite sleeve that turns your IPhone into a sat phone. http://www.thuraya.com/SatSleeve I had 2 satellite phones years back, Globalstar and I forget the other telco or something... They worked OK, but when you weren't using them, it was like $30 a month just to have the account... and when you did use them - it was like $3 bucks a minute whether the call was incoming or outgoing & that adds up bloody fast. So for e.g. if your traveling remote for any length of time, you have to pay your sat phone bill at the end of each month or they cut you off... but there's just one problem with that - when you go to their automated bill pay service via the satellite phone the "time delay" doesn't allow you to pay your bill by the Sat phone with your credit card because with the time delay bye the time the computer generated voice asks you to enter your account number or your credit card number or how much you want to pay etc the automated computer at their end thinks you didn't answer and starts with the whole menu options list again and you spend hours trying to pay the bill (at $3 a minute) - so you run up a $500 bill on the one call trying to pay last months bill, and it doesn't work then they cut you off for non payment etc etc! Another 'problem' is you can't 100% guarantee that the sat phone will always work!. You'd think you can but you can't. We were out at the Houtman Abrolhos Islands (54 Nmiles off Geraldton) one Easter for a couple weeks all up & had to try and make these calls & couldn't get a Satellite signal for the life of us... there was no obstructed view of the sky in all directions... no hills or trees out there to obscure your view of the sky at all so in theiry you should be able t ping a satellite any time night or day but not so... Over the 4 days we tried hundreds of times every day (because the matter was urgent) and couldn't raise a soul., When we got home we got a bill for like $2000+ for not actually being able to contact anyone at all... so it turns out the Satellite was getting our signal and racking up a $2 or $3 each time hundreds of times a day for the whole Easter period. BUT - the satellite was unable to connect to the ground station at Meekatharra or somewhere because there had been a thunderstorm and lightening had taken down the mains power connected to the ground receiving station. The ground receiving station had a automated backup generator system and diesel fuel tank, for just such a scenario BUT some enterprising local abbbadiginies had managed to find this diesel tank and drain it into jerry cans to fill their land cruisers for free and stolen the whole 2000 liters over a period of time and it wasn't till the power went down that anyone realized the tank was dry and there was no backup supply for the backup generator... So they did try to get emergency delivery of diesel to the ground station tank out of Meekatharra by their fuel delivery contractor over Easter but being Easter their fuel contractor said "sod off, it's Easter, I'll do it first thing Wednesday after Easter when I get back from my long weekend away fishing!". So while we had 2 Sat phones with us at the Islands we couldn't actually use either... for the whole 5 days of Easter, yet they stil expected me to pay the $2000 bill for connecting to the satellite - even tho the satellite couldn't connect me to anyone down here on earth. They got a rude shock when I told em to whack their sat phones where the sun don't shine... Its OK if your safe on an Island and you can wait - but maybe not so much if your floating around in a life raft at sea for 4 days with great while sharks (or crocks) wanting to use the raft as a teething ring - it would be preferable if the damn things worked like you think they should. So they can be good BUT they aren't all that they are sometimes cracked up to be, by people who've never actually had one or the mega bills that go with them! Just a heads up basically.

Welcome aboard Plugger. There's a few to hunt in W.A. Can I ask - how would you plan to hunt them? Cheers.

Always preferred a Folding Gerber Sportsman in a scabbard on my belt, RH said. Fixed blades were always kept in my butchering bag, along with knife steels, gambrel, clever and hack saw with meat bandsaw blade fitted. I liked the fact with a folding knife in a black scabbard on a black leather belt - it wasn't obvious. I could walk into banks and shops etc without people calling the police. No one knows if its a Leatherman tool or a folding knife etc - it's discrete, BUT it also doesn't get in the way getting into and out of cars or caught around seat belts etc. You hardly know you have it there. Been a fan of the Gerber folding sportsman 1 2 & 3 for maybe 40+ years now since the early 1970's when I bought my first one.