Month: February 2017

How to replace the noisy fan in an Icom ID-5100 with a much quieter one

Inside of the Icom ID-5100 showing the new fan in place

I’m a happy owner of two Icom ID-5100 radios, one is mounted in the car and I use the other one in the shack on low power for working the local repeaters.  It doesn’t get much use but I’m monitoring GB3CL and GB7TE most of the time. About the only thing which I don’t like about this […]

5B4AGN bandpass filters – The measurements

5B4AGN Bandpass filter performance measurements

I’ve been moving some boxes around recently and I unpacked the bandpass filters I built for one of the Martello Tower Group DXpeditions and successfully used again during our activation of the MV Ross Revenge in August 2016. It struck me that I’d never produced a full set of figures showing rejection on each band, insertion […]

MB7UIV is back

A little history In January 2000 I started running the first licensed APRS Internet gateway in the UK originally with the callsign GB7UIV.  Within a week of experiments starting on the 26th January 2000, the gateway was on air and connected to the internet 24/7 except for periods when the connection dropped out and the […]

Setting up an APRS RX only iGate using a Raspberry Pi, RTL-SDR dongle and a pre-built image

After my previous post, it was suggested that an easier way to set up a receive only APRS iGate would be to provide a pre-built image which only needs slight tweaking to go live.  That seemed like a good idea to me so I’ve prepared an image that just requires a handful of configuration changes which I will […]

A guide to setting up an APRS receive only iGate using a Raspberry Pi and an RTL-SDR dongle

** This is now outdated, I recommend the pre-built image from here rather than following these instructions.  I can not support this method any more ** I originally bought a Raspberry Pi back in October 2012 but as I didn’t have a specific purpose in mind for it, I quickly sold it again.  A few […]