In my last post, I said that I’d be replacing the broken Expert with a valve amplifier and I’ve done just that. I now have an Acom 1500 sitting on the shelf in my shack. There simply wasn’t enough room on my desk to fit the amplifier and the Kenwood TS-890 so I had to […]
Wow! That’s taken a while. Back in August 2017 I set myself a challenge to work DXCC on 17m using just FT8. At the time, I described it as ‘the new FT8 mode’ and it really was in its infancy back then. I completed that challenge in March 2018 and then quietly set myself another […]
I posted back in January to say that the 17m element on my Hexbeam had snapped in the storms and was causing problems. It took over three months before everything came together to allow me to get the mast down and repair it but I managed it last weekend, just in time for the CQ […]
There’s been lots going on in my life throughout January but that hasn’t stopped me playing radio – I’ve made a point of sitting in the shack for a few minutes every day just to take my mind off of other things and as a result, I’ve managed nearly 550 QSOs so far working 73 […]
Over the last couple of months I’ve been concentrating on 30m using the dipole I installed late last year because I was keen to complete my 30m DXCC before the winter kicks in. Most of my contacts on 30m are using digital modes, either JT65, JT9 (remember them?) or FT8 and I knew that I’d […]
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 […]
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 […]
Over the last four or five years I’ve been a regular user of two digital voice modes, D-STAR and DMR. I don’t particularly like to use them to work ‘DX’ but they both have their advantages regarding linking repeaters together and allowing me to keep in touch with people when I’m away from home. Both […]
I’ve been running an instance of Virtual Radar Server (VRS) for some time and recently decided that this is something I can easily share to anyone who is interested. What is VRS though? VRS is a server running on my network that can take a feed from multiple ADS-B receivers, consolidate them together and provide […]
A week or so ago I saw a weather fax (WEFAX) picture someone had posted that they’d captured on HF. This grabbed my attention because I like maps and I like to see things to do with the weather. I’d tried a couple of years ago to receive satellite weather pictures with little success (due […]
