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We always aim to have at least five stations on from the Camb-Hams for any of the AFS events, because it’s the top four scores in the team that are counted for the Super-league, and you never know when failure might befall one of the stations. Today, it was our turn to suffer from equipment…
Once in a while, two Cambridge primary schools, Queen Emma and Queen Edith join together for a day of extra-curricular, but curriculum-linked, activities for their students on a Saturday. Today, the theme was ‘Spoken Word’ and so Cambridge 105 Radio were invited along to give the pupils an experience of being on the radio. So,…
I was invited to Suffolk RED last evening for the opportunity to demonstrate the sort of equipment I take up hills for SOTA purposes. For those who don’t know, Suffolk RED (Radio and Electronics Development) is a monthly supra-club event, now into its fourth year, which has proved very popular in East Anglia. The premise…
I had a bit of spare time over the weekend, so gave away a few points in the French REF-CW contest. Equipment was my Elecraft K3 with just 40W out (to prevent QRM to neighbours) to my 30m dipole, tuned onto 40m. I’m not entirely sure how effective this was. Many stations seemed to struggle…
I operated with Rob M0VFC for the three RSGB 80m and 40m Affiliated Society Contests in January 2018 from Flossie, the Camb-Hams van, at our Worts Causeway site (JO02CE). CW (Sunday 7th January) This was a very fun event. We were using two Elecraft K3s, one with a KPA500, and the other with a Juma…
This post describes a project I’ve been working on during Christmas this year. It is a project that’s absolutely not for the inexperienced, so if you decide to take any of the ideas in this post – which you’re absolutely welcome to do – I won’t be able to assist. This is Part 1 of the post.…
In August 2017, I spent a few days doing some of the Summits on the Air summits in the Pyrenees. Monday 31st July Trône du Roi (F/PO-187): Attempt 1 After flying into Toulouse and getting a hire car (which took an unexpectedly long time), I drove to the Trône du Roi (King’s Throne) to operate,…
It’s the call every IT-savvy child of elderly parents dreads: ‘I got a message on the screen saying my computer had a problem and I had to call Microsoft. I rang them and they took control of the computer, then said it would cost several hundred pounds to put right…’. Oh, oh. So, having told…
As those of you who know may will recall, I was made redundant from my job as a Scrum Master at Redgate back at the end of May 2016. Luckily, I wasn’t out of work for too long and since July I’ve been working at a major multinational ecommerce player in the travel and tourism…
I don’t typically write a blog post like this, but I’ve had an infuriating day messing around writing an Alexa skill, and wanted to explain the issues I’ve faced for anyone else trying to do something similar. First though, an important note: because of the problem I haven’t submitted the skill to Amazon, so only…