I’ve been away from the web site for a few weeks because of

“stupid things wot I ave done“

In short I killed off my laptop. For the full story have a look at my other blog here. Needless to say that I am now fully back up and running online.

So while I was off line I my radio activity took a bit of a back seat but that gave me the time to make a few changes to the shack. First of all I got rid of the Icom IC-705 and the Yaesu FT-5D and traded them in for a lovely new Yaesu FTM-500 VHF/UHF rig. With the change of antenna I wasn’t using the 705 on HF anymore so just had it dialled into local VHF/UHF repeaters but only had 5-10 watts of power which was a bit limiting. The FTM-500 gives me 50 watts of power so makes the connection just that little bit better. I have to say that I am very impressed with the new rig.

At the same time I picked up the FTM-500 I also picked up a new Microham Arco rotator controller. My current Yaesu G450 controller is fully manual and while this is fine I very much wanted to take advantage of the built in rotator functionality of Ham Radio Deluxe. By just typing the call sign into the log book it will find the users details and point the rotator all at the push of a button.

I’m still waiting for delivery of the Arco but it should me here any time now and I look forward to updating everyone on how it works.