Hi! My name is Gavin, welcome to my webpage. I hope to use this space to chronicle my adventures in amateur radio and electronics. I’ll most likely add a few pages about other hobbies and interest as and when I have time.
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Using Power Point for Project Decaling
So I build loads of project which in the end require labelling, but how to do it so it seems professional? In the past I used to just make lines of text which was more or less the project name and my callsign, printed it and stuck it to the box, not very professional! Well while looking at some projects on the net over the weekend I found a Cumbria Designs Minicounter frequency counter built by Matti Niskanen, OH2CF which looked like a real professional [...]
Shack Panorama
So after sending a quick picture to Twitter showing my clean shack I got quite a few replies. I thought therefore it would be good to show the shack in its entirety. I first Googled to see if Picasa could do it and got a result back for Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (could this be a #fail for Google?). Anyhow after a straigh forward email, had to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile, which the installer gave [...]
6m DX Window
So I can’t get it out of my head all the grief I got after operating within the top 3 KHz of the DX window on the 6m band… The conditions were such that there was a chance of some North African stations being on the band so I thought I’d position myself at the top end, not the middle of the DX band incase, also I should point out in region 1 the band plans are only guidance. People trying to tell me I [...]
DX’Peditions and shack improvements!
It has been a busy month. First I was on holiday for 2 weeks, one week at my parents in Scotland and the 2nd I was on the Isle of Arran for the Camb-Hams 2011 DX’Pedition. The DX’Pedition was sponsorship by Kenwood UK, Icom UK and Linear Amp UK. The latter provided us with an HF amp (Challenger) and a 6m/4m (Discovery 64) amp. On the DX’Pedition we planned to make about 4000 QSOs in the week, this is about what we have managed to [...]
PC Trouble
So about a week ago I tweeted that my PC had crashed and on boot-up I got error messages saying there were missing DLL and SYS files for the programs which were running when the crash happened. All week the PC had sputtered which was uncharacteristic of it being quite a decent machine. I decided to run the Maxtor disk check utility which it failed the disk and recommended I replace it, so after a reboot to do more detailed test it failed to boot, [...]