Blog Archive — 2024

POTA Activation Report: Moors Valley

Written on Saturday 28 Dec 2024

We are continuing working our way around local parks, nerding out on the radio in all the places we haven’t previously nerded before. This afternoon it was the turn of Moors Valley Country Park, POTA ref. GB-1724. This place is the peak of childhood days out, aged about 6-10. There’s...

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POTA Activation Report: Canford Heath

Written on Monday 23 Dec 2024

From the smallest local SSSI, to the largest! Completing the trifecta of local heathland areas that I recently asked to be added to Parks on the Air, this is Canford Heath Site of Significant Scientific Interest (GB-3623, GFF-0315). It’s one of the largest protected heathland areas in Dorset, and it’s...

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POTA Activation Report: Turbary Common

Written on Thursday 19 Dec 2024

When I realised I was leaving home with only two hours to go until sunset, should I have taken the hint? When I realised I’d forgotten the camp chair, and my activation spot would be a bramble-covered tree stump, should I have taken the hint? When the rain started blowing...

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Billy Bass Basket Case (Alt. Ver.)

Written on Wednesday 18 Dec 2024

Earlier this year, Green Day announced a number of special releases to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their album Dookie. My first reaction was, of course, “oh god what no, it’s not thirty… of fuck, please stop reminding me that I am middle-aged!” Once I got over the shock, I...

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POTA Activation Report: Talbot Heath

Written on Tuesday 17 Dec 2024

It’s another one of those limbo days, where I’m not at work but the rest of the household are out doing their normal weekday things. After so many years of family and working life, I have to remind myself that it’s actually possible to just go out and do something—no...

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POTA Activation Report: Holton Heath

Written on Saturday 16 Nov 2024

Ever since our first Brownsea Island activation I’ve been thinking of ticking off other nearby parks that are still sat unactivated. A recent update added pretty much every scrap of green space in Christchurch, but all of those were quickly snapped up. A weird outlier nearby, though, is GB-0093 Dorset...

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POTA Activation Report: River Hamble Country Park

Written on Tuesday 12 Nov 2024

My work off-site finished at lunchtime, leaving me with little to do besides drive most of the M27 and sit around at home. A better idea: do some radio nerd stuff in a field instead. The BBQ field at River Hamble Country Park GB-2465, River Hamble Country Park is sited...

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POTA Activation Report: Poor Common

Written on Thursday 31 Oct 2024

There are dozens, if not hundreds of places in the UK called “Poor Common”; land granted many centuries ago by the local Lord to ordinary people so that they had somewhere to graze their livestock. But this one, GB-1723 Poor Common Nature Reserve is the only one in the POTA...

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POTA Activation Report: Canford Cliffs

Written on Monday 28 Oct 2024

It’s a week of leave from work, I have nothing urgent to do, and so: my second POTA activation in two days! This one had a very different feel to Saturday’s sunny afternoon activation. The day dawned damp and windy, but at least not actively raining—sadly, that was to change...

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POTA Activation Report: Hengistbury Head

Written on Saturday 26 Oct 2024

After JOTA, where my daughter casually snagged her first transatlantic SSB contact, I decided to set myself a goal: by the end of the year, I was going to have my first transatlantic POTA park-to-park. Jim, N4JAW told me he thought it’d be easy, but I wasn’t entirely sure—he is...

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Jamboree on the Air 2024

Written on Saturday 19 Oct 2024

It’s been a year since my daughter, a young leader at the local Scout troop, helped with JOTA/JOTI and remarked that they were only really doing the “on the internet” side of it, not the “on the air” side. And that we should fix that. I didn’t have the Full...

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POTA Activation Report: Upton Heath

Written on Sunday 13 Oct 2024

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,It basically looped back on itself and it was quite muddy.Probably should have stuck with the road all those other folks took."—Robert Frost, POTA Activator (probably) It’s October, out on the heath. The days start cold now,...

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PAC-12 / JPC-12 Antenna Review

Written on Saturday 28 Sep 2024

Since I started doing POTA earlier this year, my go-to antenna has been a 20/40m dipole in an inverted-V configuration, the central pole being about 6m high. I like the simplicity and efficiency of a dipole, along with the knowledge that it was cut to the right resonant frequencies and...

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POTA Activation Report: The New Forest

Written on Monday 26 Aug 2024

With an area of over 200 square miles, 175,000 permanent residents and over 15 million tourists a year, GB-0112: New Forest National Park feels like one of the cheaper POTA locations; much like the “Dorset National Landscape” which covers near half my county. Nevertheless, it’s one of the local spots...

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The Great Shack QRM Hunt (2024 Edition)

Written on Saturday 17 Aug 2024

A year or so ago, being unhappy with the large amount of noise I saw when playing radio from home (particularly on the 40-metre band), I went on a hunt for the causes. I turned off everything I could, bar the radio and its power supply, jumped around the band...

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POTA Activation Report: Studland Heath

Written on Wednesday 14 Aug 2024

Despite living here on the Dorset coast all my life, when we pick a place to do this POTA nonsense and head out, I still get a bit of a rush when I think that all this beauty is just there, a few minutes down the road, for everyone to...

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A Combined ADS-B and AIS Map: The Hacky Way

Written on Monday 12 Aug 2024

The Online Amateur Radio Community runs an instance of tar1090 to aggregate ADS-B and MLAT data received by its members. While not strictly “amateur radio”, it’s adjacent enough that it generally sits in the area of ~50 contributors at any one time, and gives us pretty good coverage of most...

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POTA Activation Report: Old Harry Rocks

Written on Sunday 21 Jul 2024

It’s another weekend, and time for another Parks on the Air adventure. Not just any weekend in fact—it’s POTA’s Summer “Support your Parks” weekend, so there’s even a certificate in it for this one. Well, a downloadable PDF of a certificate, but still. It’s also part of the Worked all...

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POTA Activation Report: Brownsea Island

Written on Sunday 14 Jul 2024

Since my first activation gave me the “outdoor radio” bug, I had been checking out the local POTA spots to see what the local scene is like. Some spots have dozens or hundreds of QSOs from some monster activators like M0MJA and 2E0HPI, whom I could never dream of catching....

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My First, Easiest (and Last?) SOTA

Written on Sunday 30 Jun 2024

Wait, “Last”? Well the truth is, it might be my last, but definitely not because we had a bad time. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first, if you spotted a couple of weirdos on a hilltop with a big antenna yesterday, this is what was going...

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New Callsign Day!

Written on Wednesday 19 Jun 2024

I’m happy to say that for the third, and possibly final time, it’s New Ham Radio Callsign day for me! Over the weekend I finally got around to sitting my Full amateur radio licence exam, thanks to the great help I received from the Online Amateur Radio Community (OARC). In...

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A Brief History of my Early Tech

Written on Saturday 25 May 2024

As a teenager I was somewhat obsessed with early “Personal Electronic Organisers”, ancestors I suppose of today’s smartphones. For a while I’ve been trying to pull together a list of exactly what devices I owned, from the earliest devices up until the point everyone had a flat black rectangle in...

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Meshtastic!

Written on Friday 1 Mar 2024

Meshtastic really seems to be taking off at the moment—certainly at work, and it seems in the wider world as well. If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s software designed to run on cheap LoRa radio boards like these, and provide an “off-grid” messaging and tracking capability. It fills...

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Setting up Proxmox on the Home Lab

Written on Sunday 18 Feb 2024

I have spent the last couple of days moving my two “home lab” servers over to using Proxmox Virtual Environment as their base operating system. This is the latest step in my attempt to separate out and containerise the tasks that run on our home network. Starting from one very...

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