Biography
Hello, hola, bonjour, zdravstvuyte, guten-tag, salve, Olá, salaam
Mark here from England. Buxton in North Derbyshire to be more precise.
I was first licenced back in 1988 and I really enjoyed the hobby back then, buying dirt cheap Pye Wesminsters and crystaling / aligning them up for various channels. Picked up an old Pye Pocketphone and converted it for listening in on the local police chatter channel prior to the airwave digital implementation. we had some laughs with that.
Anyway I let G7BGS lapse and a couple of years later I applied for a new licence G7RBY because I was attracted to Packet radio. I had my first PC Amstrad 1640 with 40 Meg hard drive (impressed eh?, especially as we can now get 1TB on an SD card ) my TNC and my converted Pye Wessie. The relay on transmit was quite noisy and my wife, (OK OK my XYL) was somewhat exercised about it going off at all hours but it was fun for a bit until I had mastered the mode.
Time passes, G7RBY lapses and I decide to re-edufercate myself and end up going to university - to study IT. I found I was quite good with electronic communications, satellite, optical fibres etc because of the same interest that brought me to ham radio.
So why am I back???
Good question - I became aware of the new digital modes and all the hoo-har surrounding single board computers such as the Raspberry PI... combined with a whole host of great value Chinese radios. I live at 1300ft above sea level so it would be churlish not to take advantage of my great Pennine height advantage - yes?
So I resurrected my old callsign G7BGS with Ofcom and now I'm working through the DMR modes which are familiar to me with being a consultant to the Airwave contract for the civil nuclear constabulary in a past role.
Great fun to make stuff work with a cheap Raspberry Pi and an MMDVM. I'll soon get bored of it I know...Where I want to be is on HF trying FT8 and similar modes. (I'm not a great conversationalist you see), but I enjoy messing about with bits of wire, poles & pulleys and the like. I'll wait until a cheap Chinese HF set comes my way, or build a little QRP set and get going (recommendations welcome)
What do I run? - currently just a little RD-5R handset on DMR with a mmdvm but trying to squeeze as much as possible out of 10Mw signal - minimal eh? I guess I'm well into the radio computer interface game.
Right that's me.
Ta ta
PS not interested in the weather where you are ;-)
Equipment
All cheap and nasty ex WD and Chineese stuff - works a treat!