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I treated myself to a new Ham Shack Clock this week and it arrived in the post yesterday. Un-packed it, powered it up, set the time and date and placed it in the best location I could find to give it an “always on” power supply. I have to say that it looked very good…

It’s a debate I see all over the place on the interweb, is FT8 real radio? or alternately is FT8 killing real Radio? I’ve thought about it a lot and I have come down on the side that FT8 is real radio and what’s more, I think it opens up long distance, weak signal HF…

For a while now I’ve had an SDRPlay RSPdx radio sitting to the side of my desk but I’ve never really given it the time it needs and deserves to get it up and running properly. So, yesterday (Friday) I sat down from 6am and made it my mission to sort out and understand the…

This past week I’ve decided to upgrade the Yaesu FT-891 to something a little more modern so I pulled the trigger on purchasing the Yaesu FT-710. There where a number of reasons for this. When I bought the FT-891 a few months ago I wanted something small to sit in the corner of the desk…

Not going to say what just now but later today DPD will be dropping of a new toy for the shack. Drop back in for an update in a few hours.

Yesterday saw the implication of my Mk-III 9m long end fed random wire antenna. Mk-I was a test of concept and consisted of a 5m long end fed random wire into a 9:1 unun strung between 2 light stands. This confirmed that (a) the AH-705 would match the antenna and (b) I would be able…

I’m a little bit intrigued to hear that Icom are about or have already released a new handheld scanner. I was rather hoping for a successor to the amazing R20 and R30 but it seems that the R15 is anything but a successor. I’ll grant that it is going to be a much lower price…

I’ve come across a polaroid photo of my old shack before I boxed it all up and sold it several years ago. It brings back a lot of old memories and made me smile when I found it. It consists of the following kit.

I really can not believe just how lucky I am. Across just about every HF band open to me I get almost zero interference/Background noise. To say I live in the city and I’m in a large block of flats there is NOTHING!

At the moment I have VERY limited space to put any sort of antenna up on a long term basis. What I have now is a 9m long random end fed wire going into an LDG 9:1 Unun about 12 feet off the ground and located in a gap between my block of flats and…