I saw this posted on a forum somewhere recently and it struck me as being the best piece of advice for newly licenced radio amateurs that I’ve ever seen. It’s quite straightforward: “Don’t get offended if someone corrects you” In the UK, it’s possible to go from having zero knowledge to getting your Foundation licence […]
Category: Amateur radio
A new cable for my MFJ-434B Voice Keyer
A while ago I moved some equipment around in the shack and I managed to damage the cable that goes between my MFJ-434B Voice Keyer and my TS-590SG. I could have patched it back together but it would have been very messy. I struggled to locate a UK supplier of the cable and I couldn’t […]
How to update and upgrade your Pi-Star based hotspot
There are a couple of methods of updating a Pi-Star based MMDVM hotspot, one upgrades Pi-Star itself and the other method does a full operating system update as well as Pi-Star. The Pi itself automatically runs a process overnight that updates the host file and various other things but this is how to do a […]
Broken hexbeam – Worst aerial damage I’ve had
Back in February, the UK was hit heavily by two overlapping storms, Ciara and Dennis and it was during these storms that my hexbeam took the hit that broke it. Here you can see the aerials being blown about badly and although I didn’t realise it at the time, the initial damage had already been […]
How to enable cross band repeater on an Icom ID-5100E
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 […]
A new sign over the shack door
My wife bought me a sign to put over the shack door for Christmas, it’s the sort of sign where you get a blank board and have to fit the letters yourself. As I was quite immobile over the Christmas period, I didn’t get around to doing this until last week. To avoid drilling through […]
UTC clock for macOS
As radio amateurs, time is important to us and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), often called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the most important. We log our QSOs in UTC, (ideally) we give net times in UTC and our clocks need to be accurate to the second for data modes such as FT8, FT4, JT65, JT9 […]
Social Distancing
You can get this design on a t-shirt from Redbubble by clicking here with proceeds going to Age UK. Be safe.73 Keith G6NHU
Shack maps
Maps are important to radio amateurs – We like to make contact with countries all around the world so a good map is essential. Some years ago I bought an Amateur Radio World Prefix map from DXMaps and it’s been on my wall ever since. I noticed that there was a tiny minor printing error […]
