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 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 […]
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 […]