Contents - Index

Browse VK Shires List

The 'VK Callbook Mapper' programme includes a list of all Australian Shires, which will be of much interest for the annual Shires Contest, and for Shire Award hunters. All 544 shires are included, and each lists their WIA Shire Id, their name, state, and latitude/longitude center-positions.

For more information about the 'Australian Shires' programme, contest and awards, please visit: www.wia.org.au/members/contests/wavks  (Link will open in your Browser).

Assuming that you have entered your QTH's latitude and longitude position by clicking 'Help > Options > Mapping > User Details', you can then perform a 'User Spatial Query' on the Shires table data by right-clicking any table line and choosing 'User Spatial Query'. What this command does is to order the complete table by distance from your User-location. You can thus discover the Shires that are the closest to you, and those farthest way. A 'Bearing' column is also added to the table, that shows the short-path bearing from your User-location to the center of that Shire: a very handy and unique feature when operating in the Shires Contest. If you wish, you can order the table by bearing simply by clicking that column's header, to see all of the shires that your signal will cross on any particular beam-heading, and those shires that will be included for a specified beam pattern width.

Choosing the 'Row Spatial Query' after right-clicking a line in the Shires table will sort the table in order of distance from that particular line's point of reference. This can be very useful if you are a roving mobile station, and want to see which Shires you could activate within a certain range during a drive-around mobile contest entry.

You can add a marker to the Online and Overlay Maps for any Shire by right-clicking it in the table and choosing 'Show on Map'. Once the marker is on the map, you can then perform other Spatial Queries based on its center-position by right-clicking the marker.

Although you can choose the individual type of marker used to mark a Shire on the map by clicking 'Help > Options > POI Markers > Choose Shires Marker-Type', the Shires markers do not have their own layer over the maps, but rather are added to the collective POI Layer, which also contains markers for IOTA, SOTA, ARLHS, WLOTA, and WWFF. You can hide or clear this layer by clicking 'Markers > Hide POI Markers' or  'Markers > Clear POI Markers', but the action you perform will also be performed on all other existing POI Markers.