Blog — Page 2

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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