Dave, M0BGR - An Update

I have not posted anything on this blog for a while, so it’s time for an update. I am still active in Amateur Radio and this is what I have been up to.

On the personal side, I retired and closed my business in February 2019. I was tempted to buy a big shiny radio to play with until my dotage but I decided against this:

• -          I have antenna restrictions here so there is not much point owning a rig that will put out Gigawatts of power, and anyway, I like QRP working.
• -          The time will come, not too soon I hope, when we have to move into a smaller dwelling, then possibly into a care home, so a large radio, and associated power supply etc. will just not cut it.
• -           I have been interested in radio since I was nine years old and I want to continue for as long as I can. So this suggests I should keep my station as small as possible.

I have therefore been selling as much equipment as I can, including my first HF rig an SGC-2020. This was a bit of a wrench, but I decided it really did not have a place in my new setup.

My station is now built round my Yaesu FT-817. This together with a Z-11 auto tuner, small power supply and a Signalink digital interface means my main station has a footprint of a paperback book. It also means I have the equipment I need to do portable operations. 

I have kept a few of handheld radios, a Tytera MD-380 for DMR and a couple of Woxuns for analogue 4m 2m and 70 cm.

I have also made a few purchases. As well as operating, I also enjoy short-wave listening. In keeping with my ‘small is good’ strategy, I bought a couple of SDR radios. The first was a Funcube Pro Plus and the other was an SDRPlay RSP 1A. These radios work amazingly well and I am puzzled why anyone would buy a large, expensive radio receiver. 

That’s me just about caught up, but I will talk about some of the pieces of equipment I have mentioned here in later blog posts

73 Dave M0BGR