SOTA equipment on a table

SOTA Equipment demo at Suffolk RED

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…

Final Score: 1620. 36 departments worked.

A non-serious entry in REF-CW 2018

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…

Amateur Radio Logging in the Cloud (Part 1)

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.…

SOTA trip to the West Pyrenees

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,…

Rescuing a hacked computer

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…

My first six months in a new role

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…

Pain with decimals in Alexa Development

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…