I’ve been dabbling with APRS ever since I upgraded my mobile radio a few years ago. I’ve since added an APRS capable handheld radio to my equipment too. All of my transmitted position reports are picked up by someone else’s receivers, which is nice but seems a bit one sided. I had a spare Raspberry […]
In my radio shack I have a ‘Desktop’ PC. A traditional machine attached to a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. My current machine was gifted to me by a local company that was refreshing its hardware. It’s about 15 years old, and works fine but it consumes a fair bit of electricity by […]
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… […]
One of my colleagues asked me to have a look at receiver that wasn’t behaving well. It was one of the many USB receivers that are around based on the RTL 2832U and Rafael Micro R820T tuner chips. The device was very intermittent, but he wasn’t sure if it was a problem with the hardware, […]
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 […]
About once every year, I like to log in to Ofcom’s website and revalidate 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 […]
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 […]
The GB3IM-S amateur radio repeater on the summit of Snaefell was brought back into service on 17th March. This led me to discover that the output frequency of 433.125 MHz becomes unusable when driving through Ballasalla, due to some strong interference on that frequency. Now, in these modern days where everything has a computer inside […]
While I was out walking the dogs today, I noticed that GB3GD is back in service. GB3GD is the callsign of an amateur radio repeater, located on the summit of Snaefell on the Isle of Man. A repeater is a radio receiver and transmitter (combined with some control logic too) that takes weak signals from […]