I have been into radio for as long as I can remember. I used to take apart my mums radios and my sisters record players when I was a nipper ;-)

Did a lot of CB Radio in the late 70's through to the early 90's when I got my license. I did learn a lot from CB Radio. I built various aerials - dipoles, beams, co-linears etc, microphones, pre-amps, repaired and modified a few, blew some up, got RF burns, annoyed the neighbours and my parents and was always aware that there may be a knock on the door so amateur radio was the next logical step for me.

I spend most of my radio time on HF now as the local 2M scene is very poor, and 70 Cms is as dead as a dodo. My main interests are really digital modes. I am very active on the HF bands using FT8 and PSK, mainly on 40m, 20m and 10m. Some times you might see me on SSTV on 20 metres and from time to time I actually speak! I don't really bother with QSL cards, so... But if you do send an e-qsl, I will send you a view from my island.

Hope to meet you on the electric wireless in the future.

73.

My current shack consists of the following:

• Icom IC-7300
• Anytone AT-778UV dual band FM
• Yaesu FT-65 Dual Band hand held
• Yaesu FT-70 C4FM digital / analogue hand held
• MFJ 939 Intellituner
• 10M end fed through 49:1 un-un (40, 20, 15, 10)
• 10M monoband wire dipole
• Diamond X510-N dual band colinear

I.T. in my shack consists of:

• Dell Core I7
• 32 Gb DDR 4 RAM
• Windows 11
• HRD for digi modes and logging
• WSJT-X
• Grid Tracker
• Live MUF by Dave Edwards G7RAU
• Station Master by Stu E. Green G5STU

I live on The Isle of Wight which is right in the centre of the south coast of England. I was born and grew up and went to school on the island, but have worked in many places around the country and abroad in my role as a software developer whilst being based in Southampton writing software for SMEs around the world. I also, whilst working there, designed and built hardware for the UK MoD and US DoD and then wrote the software that made it work. I did a lot of web development and database development / administration. I wrote a logging program for amateur radio called Log_RES which was at the time fairly comprhensive. It did call lookups, distance and bearing calculations, dx cluster, world maps, solar activity etc, all live. It fed the log data direct to my website in real time from the MySQL database running on my DB server. I was lucky enough to have a static IP address at the time so hosted my website from a webserver in my shack. There was also a phpBBS running too. After that I worked as a self employed I.T. consultant and wedding / events / publicity photographer (which I had been doing since 1988 alongside my full time jobs), but due to illness since 2016, I am now retired. I lived for a while in New South Wales, Australia with my now ex wife, and now live back on the Island (EU 120).

Radio has always been a passion for me, as has photography (I still have a darkroom and several film cameras, both 35mm and medium format as well as several digital SLRs). Other interests include playing guitar and recording, cooking, walking, theatre, art, ballet and travelling abroad, I like beer and brew my own, I'm a simple soul and am easily pleased.

Join my Discord server (if you like)

 https://discord.gg/vD7fxe34PU

not much goes on there at the moment, but hopefully with some new members we can make quite an active community.