g7kse.co.uk

As a bit of a geek its easy to get drawn into new and shiny things. I’ve never really been an Apple fan, mainly because many of the products are similar to others that exist but with a more sparkly box or they are just over priced. Looking at the iPhone you can’t help but think that they are nice, but as a pay as you go kind of person I wasn’t going to fork out over £500 for a phone. Equally I’ve seen a fair few broken screens that have ended up costing the owners a lot of frustration as well as money to get fixed.

So what to get, I’m still happy with windows mobile as well, my Axim x50v served me well but it wasn’t a phone, replacing that with an HTC of sorts still meant shelling out quite a lot more than I was prepared to. So I plumped for a blackberry Storm, second hand on eBay. Always a risk but worth a punt.

After getting hold of one for a reasonable price and a few hassles with the email as it was still locked to the previous owner I’ve managed to get my email on it and a few of the apps that I used constantly with my Axim and hey presto a single device with a phone, push email, camera, gps all in one.

The gps proved useful on a trip to Glasgow where I needed to find a restaurant and the Google maps app got me there in a heartbeat, shame it isn’t turn by turn  (Blackberry maps doesn’t seem to work with Orange and Vodafone doesn’t work in my house!).

So, for those who don’t do Apple I can heartily recommend it. I don’t need a spirit level or baby shaking application so it seems as though its been a very useful purchase.

50mhz is just one of those ‘get it or forget it’ bands. Either you love it or just can’t be bothered with it. A while ago i bought a 5 ele yagi from trident to try my luck and then promptly moved house. The result was that the antenna sat in my garage for a couple of years and I didn’t get a chance to use it. This weekend I had a few spare minutes and rigged it up on my decking so that it was blocked in just about every direction but southwest through to north west.

After some scanning through the band I cam across a few EA stations and fired through a few responses as they were a strong 59. EA1GE responded and my 6m career spluttered back into life. A good 1000 miles with a lashed together set up gave me a smile and although short lived the Es also allowed a good 59 on the CS5BLA beacon.

I think it’s nearly time for a new PC. I’ve been wrestling with a dying hard drive and a soundcard that only seems to work on a few randomly chosen days so it’s probably about time to put it out of it’s misery.

It has been a really frustrating time trying to get a working PSK-31 set up with this rig and I was beginning to think that it was the rig and not the PC, but after switching things around with our Advent netbook and several copies of Ham Radio Deluxe and using both the ACC socket, RJ45 and speaker output I finally came to the conclusion that the rig is ok but in desperate need of the mic mod.

So what to get? I quite fancy something powerful and a bit useful but also something low energy. Unfortunately the two don’t go hand in hand. I like the idea of the desktop type set ups using Intel Atom processors but it might be worth waiting until the graphics get sorted out with the Ion GPU. Also either an internal or external soundcard will be a must if I’m going to venture into the SDR route with a bit of gusto.

Decisions, decisions

At least the rig is ok

As a long time fan of Ubuntu I thought about having a linux distro specifically fro ham radio. Sounds like I’m too slow. Shackbox seems to be floating about.

I think I’ll download a copy and see how it works under a virtual machine. Sounds like it could be worth a punt for the shack computer

I just got my copy of Radcom through the post today and opened up the last word section to find that I’d won a Yaesu VX-3 hand held. All courtesy of a quick email.

I’m chuffed to bits and hope that it turns up soon…Really can’t express how nice it is to be so generously rewarded for such a small email. Thanks very much RSGB