Ebay is a good place to buy accessories like speaker/mics and headsets for your radios. A few years ago I used it to buy a speaker/mic for m...

My FoxTrak APRS tracker board is now installed in a plastic case, together with 4 x AA NiMH cells which provide near enough 5V to power both...

Sometimes you just get lucky. After I repaired the TH-205E I recently won on eBay, I was looking around for ideas on what to do about the d...

I went for another stroll up Tallentire Hill this afternoon with the TH-F7E. The FT-817 is tied up running my EchoLink hotspot until I can...

If you're a regular reader of this blog you'll probably have observed my comments about the lack of activity on VHF hereabouts. Even...

As someone who likes a walk in the great outdoors I enjoy reading accounts of people who take their radios out into the countryside for a bi...

A few weeks ago I made a rubber duck helical antenna for my TH-F7E. I didn't get around to writing about it at the time, plus it took a ...

I recently sold my Yaesu VX-8E because the lack of APRS RF infrastructure in this part of the world rendered that part of its functionality...

I'm not really cut out to be an award chaser. You can too easily end up with the tail wagging the dog, staying in the shack on a fine, s...

One of my ham radio pet hates are those SMA sockets used to mount the antennas on all modern VHF/UHF handheld radios. They are very fragile,...

I have just completed the first version of what I shall call the G4ILO Wonder Whip. It's a portable HF receiving antenna for the Kenwood...

Most VHF-UHF HTs (or hand-helds, as they tend to be known over here) nowadays provide receive coverage of the HF short wave bands, though on...

I live in a VHF black hole. There is almost no activity here on two metres. I can access two repeaters from home: GB3AS and GB3DG . Most of...

My TH-F7E is here. Unfortunately I can't play with it, as the first thing you have to do is charge the battery, which takes 6.5 hours. W...