In early 2012 I bought a cheap weather station from a major UK amateur radio supplier. It lasted a few months before failing. They replaced the broken parts, it failed again a while later and they replaced the parts again. When it failed for the third time, I got fed up with it so I […]
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 […]
With all the hotspots I have in the house for various modes, I decided to do something about the RF. They all run very low power but they’re only for me to use and I didn’t want the RF escaping the house. I bought a few tiny little dummy loads from eBay and replaced the […]
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 […]
Earlier this year I replaced my Hexbeam (with another Hexbeam) and I wrote about it on this site. There was a gap of a couple of weeks when I was between aerials and to take advantage of that, I temporarily moved my ADS-B receiver to a temporary stub mast, effectively raising it 7ft from the […]
I bought myself a new handheld at the Newark rally earlier this year, an Anytone AT-D878UV to use on DMR. When I went on holiday in October, I took a couple of copies of RadCom with me and in one of them there was a review of my handheld. The author mentioned that he’d used […]
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 […]
Technically this isn’t directly about amateur radio although there is a sort of radio connection. As part of my involvement with the Martello Tower Group, I look after some equipment at two of our remote sites. We have a Linux server running our D-STAR repeater, a Windows 10 PC running our SSTV repeater and a […]
It’s been well over a year since I moved my external ADS-B receiver to the top of my Alimast and it’s been performing very well, regularly sitting in the top five of the UK receivers according to the FlightAware statistics page and in the top ten world wide on the PlaneFinder sharers list. A good location […]
A few years ago I set up a DXCluster using AR-Cluster on my old Mac Mini with Windows XP installed. It ran for a long time, I had good connections into the network and although it was listed on the DX Cluster info page, nobody ever connected to me. This was fine, the cluster was […]
