Ham Radio Operator - M0YKS

After laying a new floor I accidently dropped my YAESU G-5500 elevation - azimuth dual controller box which resulted in fault on the azimuth meter needle. The needle pinged to the right when I powered the unit up which was a pain in the back side after doing such a careful job up until that point. I had a look for the obvious but could not see anything suspicious on inspection so I decided to seek expert help. At first I found myself struggling to think of who and where I would be able to get a quality repair as amateur radio equipment is not the typical run of the mill tv or pc hardware.  The region that I live in is not the best for finding amateur specialists but fortunately there was a radio shop in South Yorkshire, about 35 miles away. I looked up the number and gave LAMCO a quick call, they told me the good news that they had a radio equipment repair service. So off we went down the M1 and came across a helpful friendly fellow amateur Dave - M0XIT who made us very w...

The Latest 2E0HTS Mobile Station  This years summer holiday started by changing our vehicle from the Toyota Rav 4 for the shiny blue Toyota Avensis as seen below. This presented a new install for me to figure out, I soon came up with a plan and carried out my new installation. In this picture you can see my Maldol HFC-20 HF antenna mounted at the rear. I ran a short ground wire from the antenna base directly to the chassis and managed to get 1:1 - 1:3 right across 20 meters.  As for the rig I decided to give my FT-100 are well deserved rest and try out my FT-857. The first thing I did was in my workshop where I folded up some sheet aluminium to cradle the FT-857 face panel. I wanted to be able to clip it to the ashtray avoiding any permanent fixings. Once I fettled the bracket to fit and work as I required I ordered a separation cable from ebay which arrived a couple of days later. I wired up the FT-857, fitted the separation cable, clipped the ashtray br...

I like playing around with the many different apps freely available to Google chrome users and earlier this evening I tried a program/app called Photo Collage. I found it at the chrome web store and simply added it to my chrome web browser. After about ten minutes I created the picture seen above from some images that  I had previously saved to my pc drive. It was really quick and easy and I think the result is quite good, hope you like it! 73 have a great weekend.

Once again another college year comes to an end after a lot of hard work. I have enjoyed teaching all of the students and as you can see by the image below its now time to celebrate success and wind down for the summer holidays.  In case you are wondering? Yes, we were on board a space craft, however the unbelievable bit is that I am the one wearing the tie! To infinity and beyond! Thankfully, I shall be back down to Earth soon and able to crack on with blogging and get some more radio play time too. 73.

As I made my way to work this morning I came across a strong signal coming in on 20m via the long path from Tasmania. It was infact VK7AC - Norm with a 5/9 signal in the clear. I gave Norm a shout and was recieved back in Tasmania with signal report of 5/7. Not a bad way to start the working day!  VK7AC - Norm's Shack 

I have been enjoying my radio equipment a lot since I settled on my preferred layout of my amateur radio station. The shack is working well as are my antennas, all that's left to do is to get busy making plenty of qso's. I am going to start making more of an effort to call CQ rather than my usual style of replying to someone else's CQ call. I guess I am a lazy operator, hopefully next time I post it will be about the stations that came back to my call as I aired my hard to catch call sign. 73!

I am always happy to exchange qsl cards and have collected far too many to count over the years. Today's package arrived via the qsl bureau and contained some nice cards. My favourite this time around is a Japanese qsl card pictured above from JA3EGZ - Mega. Happy DX, 73!