Category: VHF

How to enable cross band repeater on an Icom ID-5100E

Icom ID-5100 showing which diodes to remove to extend transmit and enable the cross band repeater

How to enable cross band repeater mode and extended transmit on the Icom ID-5100E

Digital audio noise on receive when using WIRES-X

Back in February, I bought myself a Yaesu FTM-100DE with the intent to use it connected to a PC for WIRES-X. In the meantime, I’ve been using it to talk to friends via a YSFReflector and I wrote about how to build a Yaesu System Fusion reflector on this site here. When I finally got […]

Installing a radio into my car

Mazda 6 with Watson W-770HB

About a year ago I changed my car and it’s taken a while to get around to fitting the radio into it. I’ve missed having a wireless in the car and recently resorted to keeping a handheld in the glove box so at least I could natter on the local repeater while driving around town. […]

Visiting GB6NT at Walton-on-the-Naze

View of GB6NT from the top of the Naze Tower

A few days ago was the International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend and a group of locals under the umbrella of Colchester Radio Amateurs operated a special event station using the callsign GB6NT from the Naze Tower at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex. This location is very close to me and I visited on both Saturday and Sunday.  On […]

Updated guide to setting up an APRS RX only iGate using a Raspberry Pi, RTL-SDR dongle and a pre-built image

Initial test of the RPi and RTL-SDR Dongle APRS RX only iGate using Raspbian Stretch

** image has been updated as of 21/04/2018 to resolve the problems some people had booting their Pi ** Note: 27/02/2022 I am no longer seeding either of the two source files via BitTorrent.  The compressed version is available via SourceForge, is not corrupted and will still work if you can decompress it. Other people may be seeding […]

My amateur radio station in 1991

My radio shack in 1991

I was recently looking through some old photographs and I found some pictures of my old radio shack and aerials from when I still lived at home.  These photos would have been taken in the second half of 1991. The first photo is the inside of my ‘shack’ which was really just one side of […]

New aerials for VHF/UHF (2m/70cms) and 28MHz (10m)

Diamond X510N and Sirio 827

Over the years I’ve used a few different VHF/UHF aerials here and the one I always found the best was my old Diamond X500.  I bought that when I still lived at home with my parents and it moved here with me.  It ran my original AX25 packet radio BBS and then MB7UIV and was only […]

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 […]

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 […]