In August 2009 I moved to Trumpington on the outskirts of Cambridge but for the 4 years before that I’ve lived in a fairly large village called Melbourn, situated about 12 miles south west of Cambridge, England.  I’m originally from Scotland, Helensburgh to be exact which is west of Glasgow.  I spent 2 years living in the Czech Rep. before moving to Melbourn.  I have a variety of interests such as fishing, mixing music, gardening, beer drinking etc but may main hobbies are amateur radio and electronics.

My amateur radio callsign in use nowadays is M1BXF but was originally licensed as MM1BXF and have also been active as OK8BXF.  My main interest lies in VHF/UHF weak signal digi modes, I’m a big fan of WSJT.  I usually monitor 50.230 JT6m (tropo) and 144.370 FSK441 (meteor scatter) when in the shack.  If there is a lift on I’ll be in the SSB segments of 6m, 2m or 70cm and if the moon is up then I’m likely to be lurking around the EME segment of 2m and on the JT65 EME chat page.  I can also be found using the ON4KST chat page if you want a sked.

I’m currently serving as the technical coordinator for the Cambridgeshire Repeater Group (CRG) which operate 9 amateur radio repeaters in the Cambridgeshire area with plans to develop and increase our capabilities.  I’ve been heavily focused on the relativity new digital mode D-Star having got the D-Star repeater GB7PI on air in late 2007.  I have written many D-Star related articles for the UK national ham radio organisations magazine RadCom, featured in the RSGB Radio Communication Handbook (section 9.3) and have done more than 20 D-Star presentations both locally and nationally.

Alongside the CRG I’m an active member of the Camb-Hams who are a bunch of enthusiastic hams around Cambridge who do things instead of talk about it.  So far since 2007 we have been to Ham Radio Friedrichshafen 4 times, in 2008 we went to the Island of Mull and manned IOTA, SOTA, HF and VHF stations, in September 2008 a few of us went to a radio rally in Belgium activating a SOTA summit (video) on the way.  We also entered VHF NFD in 2006, 2009 & 2010. After our 2009 dx’pedition to the Island of Harris where we operated IOTA, SOTA, HF and VHF stations we went there again in 2010.  We are very active in the UKAC contests each Tuesday and we also meet once a month for a Pie and Pint and off-air discussions.

Professionally I’m the Technology Manager for a company called IOTAS near Cambridge.  IOTAS provide GCF, IOP, KPI and a wealth of other cellular testing solutions and consultancy to a wide array of big name companies, this job takes me all over the world.  Previous positions I’ve held are a Field Applications Engineer for Aeroflex involving supporting customers of their TM500 LTE test mobile in various respects and again involved loads of travel.  Before that I worked as a senior cellular approvals engineer for CSR, one of the worlds largest fabless bluechip companies on bluetooth, GPS, UWB, NFC and WiFi but my role is in cellular software test covering technologies from GSM to LTE including HSDPA, HSUPA and HSPA+.  I used to spend lots of time travelling to standards meetings and trying to keep up to date with operators and handset companies requirements.

Station Equipment

Shack with SCAM12 with 6/4m, 2m and 23cm.

Base of SCAM12 with 2m and 70cm satellite aerials.