I wanted an aerial for portable use, so I thought I’d try a kit from Sotabeams, called a Linked Dipole Kit.

It contains all of the pieces to allow you to make up a multi-band dipole, using crocodile clips to connect together the sections of the elements, tuning for different bands.

I made mine for 17m, 20m and 40m.  Putting it on the air, with a lightweight fishing pole as a mast, it worked pretty well.

The kit can be bought from here

You can listen to my feature on this aerial on the ICQPodcast here.

Here’s a little video of a kit that I recently built.  Works very well. Should be over interest to any morse operators.

My New Year’s present to myself is a Yaesu FT-DX3000

It’s got lots of bells and whistles I need to learn about, so will no doubt be reading the manual for weeks.

So far it’s very impressive. The receiver can pick up things my old Kenwood TS570 couldn’t hear.

I attended the Friedrichshafen Ham Radio event with a number of the ICQ Podcast crew, and did lots of interviews.

Here’s one I did with Eric Swartz from Elecraft.

I managed to receive the SSTV signal from the ISS from it’s passed over the UK on the 18th and 20th of December 2014.

Here’s some of the images I downloaded :-

We held a foundation licence course over the weekend of the 15th and 16th of November, with the exam on the 22nd.

I’m happy to say that 10 out of the 11 students passed with flying colours.

The students and instructors are shown below.  I’m the one on the right of the picture.