All donations are welcome and will go towards my amateur radio adventure. 

Go on, how can you say no to those puppy dog eyes, poke her nose and donate.

The 70cm contest went well, despite the absolutely foul weather, throughout the contest I had the little fan heater on which adds a little to the noise floor but not an impossible amount.

One thing I did come across was a logging error which, thankfully wasn't a UBN. I had recorded the station call sign as G3 in the 2m contest but heard G8 on the 70cm. Minos was suggesting that I use the G3 as that was logged before with the same locator but fortunately I corrected it but it's worth noting mistakes are carried through on Minos unless corrected after the UBN reports are sent out.

I've now ordered an LNA, attenuator, and bandpass filter for 2m and 70cm so it'll be interesting to see the impact that has on reception, I did find noise cancelling headphones to be useful to chop out some of the noise.

A sucessful contest and the new plan is working rather well. I managed to work the Isle of Man which I never thought I'd be able to do, the RST was tricky but I managed to pull the contact out of the static, safe to say I'm quite happy with the new set up.

The next change will be to install a LNA, attenuator and a bandpass filter to try and lift more signals out of the static.

Position bumped up from 17 to 16 and I'm only 50 points from the next position up (Another member of BARC).

I think main things to work on are getting callsigns right first time, quite often I have to listen three or four times to get it and trying to hear the callsign during a pile up is next to impossible.

Being hard of hearing and a radio operator has presented some challenges, particularly with the older radios, I struggle to pick out weak signals from both the back ground noise and tinnitus. To that end I got interested in SDRs, after using the Burton on Trent ARC Flex radio I was convinced.

So I picked up an SDRplay RSPDx plugged in and away I went, this was great, I could finally see signals rather than struggling to hear them, then with some clever filters I could pick them out amongst the noise.

I tried on the last contest to listen on the SDR and transmit of the IC-7000, this was to put it lightly ungraceful, I had to keep unplugging the antenna from the SDR, manually switch it over and remember to tune the transmitter to the same as I listening to.

In June 2025 BARC were given permission to operate from Beacon Hill Country Park, this gave us an excellent opportunity to stretch out portable muscles and operate from one of the highest points around Loughborough.

I joined the contest late this month so missed the first hour but made some good contacts. Mostly worked south of my location on search and pounce, I tried for half an hour on one frequency calling CQ but no takers unfortunately. I'm moved up in position from 51st to 48th so something must be going right.

It was interesting to do the 70CM contest using the current setup, the sound was good with very little background noise. Safe to say it was a fun contest and I'm keen to do it again.