At the end of July, I happened to glance up at my aerial and noticed the 15m element hanging down. It was broken. It didn’t look serious though and I was sure that it was just that the connector on the end of the element had snapped off. Around the same time, I was offered […]
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. […]
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 […]
About a month ago I bought a 1090MHz PCB aerial on eBay and immediately forgot about it. It arrived a few days ago and I had a good look at it before I connected it to anything to try and work out what it actually was. I decided from the construction that it was a […]
For the last couple of months, I’ve not done much in the way of traditional radio, largely down to the fact that I’ve been really busy at work. I’ve had lots to do and I’ve spent a month working away from home either on training courses or in meetings preparing for a very large project. […]
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 […]
This weekend was the ARRL RTTY Roundup contest and for the first time, FT8 was allowed. I spent a couple of hours operating just to give away a few points and get some experience using the new version of WSJT-X in contest mode. I’d been working mainly European stations and all of a sudden, I […]
To start with, I’ll post the basic statistics for the entire year of 2018 and then go into the background. QSOs made: 3789 Unique QSOs made: 2962 Average QSOs per day: 10.4 Days missed: 0 <- This is the most important statistic, it means that QSO365 #2 was a success. DXCC entities worked: 160 New […]
I go through phases of not sleeping very well and I’m in the middle of one of those right now. Yesterday evening after a very bad night previously, I went to bed relatively early in the hope that because I was so exhausted, I might actually drop off quickly. No such luck, two hours later […]
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 […]
