New QTH, new projects…

A busy month has just passed with us moving into our new home. While there are still a few boxes to unpack and plenty of jobs to do around the house there are some exciting amateur radio projects on the horizon.

I have it in mind to set up a small station here using antennas located in the loft. I’ve been avidly reading Steve Nichols’ (G0KYA) great book Stealth Antennas. An excellent book which has given me lots of ideas to try and projects of varying size to be attempted. The first thing to get going is a simple loop around the perimeter of the loft, coupled by my SG-211 Smartuner and coax fed down to the first-floor to my Elecraft K2.

The next project on the list is a general coverage receiver based on a SoftRock SDR kit and an ESI Juli@ 192 kHz soundcard. This will be run up in the loft and accessed in the house by VNC remote desktop and maybe VLC for audio streaming. That’s the plan anyway. SDR kit and soundcard are now on order, hopefully all the bits will be here in time for Christmas when I should find some time to make it happen. I imagine there will be plenty of EMI noise up in the loft so I should think magnetic loop antennas will be on the agenda next year.

A new look

The rather sparse WordPress page you see before you is the new front-end of my personal web site. This is a work in progress!

A revamp of the old site was long overdue and I’ve decided to implement new content using WordPress for ease of use and flexibility. My previous pages were written ‘by hand’ with raw html and CSS. The world has since moved on and my spare time is significantly more limited now so I want to make it as easy as possible to add new content here.

My legacy project pages can be found here.

My blog covering my time with British Antarctic Survey can be found here.