So it seems the year has already flown by – maybe a recap of radio things would be good !

At the QTH

At home my 80M EFHW has come down due to the various storms/high winds we have had this year, the DX Commander masts (3 of them) which elevated the wire over the bungalow finally succumbed to the wind. Whilst I tried to ‘repair’ them of sorts, it was just a little too risky for my liking and felt it safer to take them down. Whilst the garden now has additional space, it means I lose full bandwidth to the 80m band, which was quite nice for listening and QSO’s.

Thankfully the seemingly bullet proof 6btv is proving its worth, albeit the 80m band is resonant on the WSPR/FT* part of the band, it still allows me to capture interesting data and make contacts in some form.

I’ve still got 3 external containers, which probably are just holding trash now, so I think my new year/spring mission will be to clean these out and skip/bin the majority of it probably as its been weather damaged.

Not so /P

Whilst my IC705 is designed for /M and /P its been one of those years where actually getting out to do radio has been a real challenge. With the introduction of parking charges in the New Forest, its really put me off going there. If I have to pay per session, it would cost alot, and getting an annual pass for something i may or may not use seems a waste of money.

There are far more POTA sites now, so it can be a case of investigate those, but time really is hard to find.

On the Internet

So after 10 years I’ve migrated the website to a new server – triggered by the PHP exploit and the server being so old it didnt have new patches for the fix, I figured a migration would be the answer ! It does mean i’ve lost some of the other sites, mostly to save on space which costs money, but also I don’t have the time to maintain them all (sites require patching/updates).

Whilst I don’t have a WSPR beacon, one thing I do when not actively on the radio is to put it onto WSJT-X and WSPR, so I will see if I can make a new WSPR site, my Python and Web development have come on a bit since I wrote the original, and it would be a nice side project, maybe integrating some ML/DL in there for WSPR analysis.

Some sad news

Not strictly radio related, but Sweety used to accompany me on some of my radio trips out, he loved going to hengistbury head for a walk and I done a couple of 2M and SSTV testing from there. Coming to the countryside for some of my POTA activations and scouting trips was fun with Sweety 🙂

After 15 years of being in our lives, Sweety sadly passed away at home in October 2026. He was well loved and we all miss him very much.

For the future..

It seems i have been on an Intermediate licence for years.. I’ve really not had the motivation or time to attempt the full licence, but I may well have reason to try for next year, as it would allow overseas operation, so I may well get my head into the radio books and give that a try!

I’ll try and do more frequent updates ! but thanks for reading the blog 🙂

73 Alan / 2E0FWE