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After our trip to Barentsberg a couple days previously, yesterday we went to Pyramiden, named after the Pyramid-shaped mountain above the town. Like Barentsberg, this is a Russian coal-mining settlement. Unlike Barentsberg, however, Pyramiden is a ghost town. Or almost a ghost town. The mine closed in 1997. Under the Svalbard Treaty, if a settlement…
Yesterday, Rob M0VFC, Steve M1ACB and I left the rest of the group in the shack while we took a trip to the Russian settlement of Barentsberg here on Svalbard. The excursion was organised by Svalbard Travel and is moderately expensive, but well worth the cost for a long day on a boat with an…
After two flights (London – Oslo, then Oslo – Longyearbyen), we’ve arrived in Svalbard. This is the view from the shack, taken just after we arrived (about 00:30 local time). The midnight sun is very real! The first surprise, we have mobile phone signals and the shack has internet. So, our fears about lack of…
From 10th-17th July 2015, I will be one of six operators activating the JW5E shack on Svalbard. We’ll be operating on 40m-10m (and maybe some 6m if conditions allow), mainly on SSB and CW, using JW/{homecall}. We won’t arrive in Longyearbyen until late in the evening of Friday 10th, and we depart very early in the morning on…
As some of you may know, I’ve been involved in Cambridge 105’s ‘Pirate Cambridge 105’ special event – a 12-hour live broadcast from a riverboat moored on the River Cam, intended to celebrate and reminisce about the golden era of Pirate Radio. In keeping with the theme, we limited ourselves to only using equipment from…
This article is my own synthesis of ideas presented at Lean Agile Scotland in September 2014 by Dan North, Jabe Bloom and Torbjörn Gyllebring, with some of my own embellishments. Any misunderstanding of their points is mine! I’ve linked to their original talks at the foot of this post. Conway’s Law says that the design…
The last project I ran here at Red Gate was on SQL Compare / Data Compare 11 project. SQL Compare is a superficially simple product designed, as it’s name suggests, to compare Microsoft SQL database schemas. Its cousin, SQL Data Compare compares the data in the tables. Like the product itself, the Compare 11 project…
On 26th May 2014, the RSGB Contest Committee announced a Whitepaper containing proposals and suggestions for various rule changes. [Whitepaper] I really welcome this development. It’s great to see the Contest Committee so engaged and keen to hear feedback, and also I like having a clear timetable for the decision-making process based on this feedback.…
As many of you will be aware, one of my many volunteer roles is as an Outside Broadcast Engineer at Cambridge 105, Cambridge’s Community FM radio station. There are essentially two types of Outside Broadcast music events that we run: those where we do the live music mix, and those where we just take an…
(or what happens if you mash-up a Software-Defined Radio, a radio microphone, a Belkin Wemo, a fridge, Yammer and the Microsoft Exchange Server API) Every few months at work (Red Gate), we have a ‘Down Tools Week’. This is a chance to divert ourselves from normal product ideas and to look instead at other things…