About Us

VK Classifieds is 24+ years old! (as of Jan 2022)  Time flies... 

24 years is a long time in Amateur radio but in net time it is a couple of eternities and sometimes it feels like it.

VK Classifieds was founded, and still run solely, by Allan VK2CA in 1998 as part of the VKHam.com website but in 2011 it was moved to its own domain and server at vkclassifieds.com.au. Currently (2021) it averages around the quarter of a million hits per month and has over three thousand registered users!  

A huge thankyou to all who have encouraged and supported me over the years, especially my great friend Steve VK2SRN (sadly SK - missed immensely!).  A big thank you also to Peter Vernon VK2US for the hosting of the VK Classifieds section from 2003 - 2011 as the traffic this service generated was enormous and would have, without major changes, brought down both VKHam and VK Classifieds.   From then until the end of 2015 it was a hosted service, both software and server, based in the United States. This was with the company that authored the software.  

While this worked well it had certain restrictions, not the least being that I really had no control/ownership of my own data etc. Especially if something happened to that company.  Well this finally happened (sort of...long story).  I was faced with the prospect of the server dbeing shut down at the start of 2016 with no recourse available to me.  It was this that prompted the change to a new server and software setup.  This proved to be a stable environment for another six years but in late 2021 both my server host and the Software I was using became "end of life" so another complete change was necessary! 

Now residing at vkclassifieds.net.au (slight change in address for convenience sake - but both .net and .com point to the same place) the site is running on its own dedicated Australian based host and running a fully licenced and owned copy of the software which I hope will negate this "disappearing company" issue from arising (once) again.  Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that it should be faster, more featured-packed, more upgradeable, more manageable and (I hope!) reliable service going forward.

I started these sites, both VKHam and VK Classifieds, with the goal of providing both an efficient service and with useful content to VK's amateur radio operators on sites that were not bogged down with fancy stuff but were as fast as I could make them.  This meant being very sparing on the pretty stuff but I believed it all contributed to sites that did what I wanted - delivered useful content in an efficient way.  This is still my basic aim today (although I hope a little prettier than they used to be).  

Again thankyou to all my supporters over the years. 

Cheers....Allan VK2CA