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Amateur Radio Hardware

Mobile Radio Upgrade

I’ve had great service from my trusty Yaesu FT-7800E transceiver for around 15 years. It’s lived in a few different vehicles, performed really well and been easy to operate on the go. That is until a few months ago, when I started to get reports from other stations that my transmitted audio was weak intermittently… […]

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Hardware

Putting the Weather Online

For Christmas I decided I would like my own weather station. I knew that I wanted it to upload the data to the cloud so that I could see trends and access the information from anywhere. I did a fair amount of research and settled on what I wanted, but the UK company wanted to […]

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Amateur Radio Hardware

SharkRF OpenSpot

I’ve been having a lot of success using my MD380 DMR transceiver together with the Isle of Man’s DMR repeater network. Sadly though, my house isn’t in coverage of the repeaters. This means I can’t use my handheld at home. The solution to this problem has come in the form of a Radio/IP gateway called […]

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Amateur Radio

Losing yourself…

About once every year, I like to log in to Ofcom’s website and re-validate my amateur radio licence. I do this so that it becomes a sort of habit, and so that I’ve no risk of going beyond the statutory five year limit. This year, my login details didn’t work. It turns out that Ofcom […]

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Amateur Radio Hardware Isle of Man

The Things are coming…

Recently, I attended #offcamp – a barcamp style discussion around open data which was organised by @bcs_isleofman and free to attend. The morning sessions were OK and it was good to see that some thought is being given to making data open and available, especially data that has been collected by governments and already paid for […]

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Amateur Radio Hardware Isle of Man

Digital Voice in Amateur Radio

Analogue signals are great in that they are simple enough to generate and demodulate, but they suffer in that the signal quality degrades when sent over a noisy radio link. With radio voice systems, this is heard as pops, crackle, hiss etc. and the problem gradually gets worse as signals get weaker. Human ears do […]