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 […]
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 […]
NOTE – 17th May 2025This has been re-written for Raspberry Pi Bookworm and has been tested on a Raspberry Pi4 using the 64 bit version of the operating system. 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 […]
In 2013 I applied for M7P as a Special Contest Callsign, and have used it successfully in a large number of contests throughout the years. One of the reasons I chose that particular callsign was for the rarity value when working the WPX contests, my logic being that people are always chasing new multipliers and […]
It’s not often that I write an update here that’s completely unrelated to radio but it’s time for that now. On the last day of November, I visited a friend of mine who lives about a mile away for a meal and a couple of drinks. Although it was a cold night, it was dry […]
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 […]
Nearly two weeks ago the UK suffered from ‘Severe storms’ with high winds across most of the country. I went outside in the rain on the Saturday morning, looked up at my aerial and was disappointed to see this. You can see the 40m element in the top is very loose and blowing freely in […]
I’ve never had a decent aerial for the 30m (10 MHz) band and have struggled to work much on the band either with my old doublet or the inverted L that I’ve had up for the last couple of years. About a month ago, I realised that I could hang a single band 30m dipole […]
Some time ago back in 2012 I first heard about the Anderson Powerpole in episode 53.5 of the Practical Amateur Radio Podcast and I immediately bought a load of them to use in the shack. I have a number of tails hanging off my PSU, all terminated in Powerpoles. I’ve always soldered the metal contact […]
