The Camb-Hams are on their usual annual pilgrimage to Scotland and I’ve worked them on a few bands and modes. I’ve also made a couple of recordings of them on 40m CW, showing how well the Kenwood TS-590SG can read Morse Code and on 40m and 80m SSB.
Category: Amateur radio
What can be achieved in twelve hours of 20m JT65/JT9?
WSPR is great, I enjoy running WSPR and seeing how far I can transmit using very low power but there are a couple of drawbacks. I appreciate this will sound as though I’m knocking WSPR but trust me, I’m really not. Firstly, it’s not a QSO mode. I accept that many years ago, some QSOs were […]
More new test gear for the shack
Back in 2012 I wrote about some new test gear that I’d bought for the shack. Well time doesn’t stand still and it’s always nice to have new toys in the shack, especially if they’re useful. My miniVNA Pro always did me well but recently I’ve started doing things on higher frequencies, such as building aerials […]
A new record – G to ZL on 60m QRSS
Toward the end of March I ran WSPR and QRSS on the 60m band for a couple of weeks. I did some experiments on 60m nearly three years ago which gave good results and I was keen to improve that. I posted on the new Knights QRSS list to announce that I would be active on 60m […]
Returning to data modes after an enforced break
My shack computer is an Apple iMac. For a few years, I’ve operated a lot of data modes and been very successful in data contests. I’ve always enjoyed data modes and in 2012 I operated GO6NHU to celebrate the London 2012 Olympics exclusively using data. Back in 2015, Apple released a new operating system called El Capitan and […]
New aerials for VHF/UHF (2m/70cms) and 28MHz (10m)
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
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
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 […]
