I needed a  “winkey”  to work with ” Starlog” the program that we use as part of the GB7HQ team for IARU, as  existing serial keying that I use with our normal Wintest is not supported in Starlog .
I ordered two units from America some time ago now and they arrived yesterday. Too late! [...]

G6PZ on 40m recorded by M0BJL

This was a fantastic event, the station worked well, we all had a great time and the WX was fantastic. On top of that Ian from Icom spent the weekend with us and made it even better.
Ian took alot away with him about our IOTA efforts and contesting in general [...]

Icom UK are visiting us for IOTA to officially hand over the IC7700 tranceivers and to take some film of us during the contest. We look forward to meeting them and having a great contest weekend.
73 Paul G6PZ

In my last post I was talking about the broken PST-61 rotator. The 61 is a strong rotator but not strong enough for the MonstIR. The SteppIR’s are quite rotator hungry, by this I mean that you need a rotator that is rated above that of what you would expect compared to a conventional yagi of [...]

For some time now the MonstIR has been without a rotator, the PST-61 that was fitted stripped its gears during a big storm in January allowing the aerial to windmill causing the MonstIR control and coaxial lines to be severed. These were repaired but the rotatator was Fubar and was removed.
The MonstIR has been fixed on EU [...]

After the shack refit the existing “tower” computers with all their associated wiring made the set up look messy so I decided to replace them with laptops. This not only saves space and tidies things up but also the on board battery acts as a mini UPS.
Three Compaq C300 wireless laptops were acquired and networked through a Belkin 54g [...]

Although we have two 7700s, for this outing we wanted to compare our IC-7800 and the new IC-7700 alongside each other in contest conditions. It’s all well and good reading up on stats and what radio has the best performance numbers but at the end of the day this means little if you can’t use [...]

This year the team decided that we should give multi-two a try. This is new territory for us as the station is optomised for multi-single events and we would be straying outside our comfort zone somewhat. That said we gave it a go!
Before the start we pulled the existing computers and set up a [...]

A couple of months ago we had a really big storm and the Cushcraft X7 HF Yagi and Tower was eating dirt. The damage was pretty severe when the tower section crumpled pushing the X7 into the ground. Luckily the main tower and aerials survived although the 160m loop was damaged.
Most of the elements [...]

I must start by thanking Icom Japan, Icom UK and Mark Haynes (M0DXR) in setting up the sponsorship deal that has led to us receiving these radios, when Mark first approached Icom some time ago the possibility of maybe one IC-756 PRO III sounded fantastic but when Icom said “how about two IC-7700s” then what [...]