VK1OD.net closure

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has required me to take a new call sign as a result of a change of my residential address.

As I will no longer use VK1OD on air, I will not masquerade under that identity on the Internet.

At the time of closing, there were 584 pages indexed, and 540,000 page fetches per annum.

The main thing that is lost is the search engine rankings on the existing high level domain (VK1OD.net).

That takes many years to acquire, years of people selecting vk1od.net from search results… and of course, if it is not highly ranked, then it doesn’t come up in search results often. Site ranking (eg Google’s PageRank algorithm) is also influenced by the number and activity of links from other sites. At the time of closure, new articles were indexed within about 3 days of posting instead of several months for a low ranked site.

So, there is no point mounting the site under a new HLD as it will be little used, almost all site traffic is due to search engine referrals.

Additionally, there is substantial work in edits to remove the VK1OD dependency / references, and the effort is not worthwhile given the direction of ham radio.

To those who have learned over the years from some of the 580 or so original works, those you have found the design tools or projects useful, and those who just enjoyed a read, I thank you for your interest.

All works remain subject to copyright. No one has been authorised to make or publish copies, PDF copies etc so if you see them, it speaks volumes of the integrity of the copyist.

 

Owen Duffy
12 December 2013