Posts

I use 80m on occasion, and I think I have enough room in the garden to accommodate a 40-10m EFHW with an 80m addition, so after watching a few YT videos I thought I'd have a go. I ordered up a piece of 40mm PVC pipe, a reel of 0.6mm magnet wire and other fittings […]...

Never one to settle for compromised antennas, I thought I'd have a go at "upgrading" my random length with 9:1 unun, and replace it with a compromised end-fed half wave with 49:1 unun and an 80m coil... Here I have stuck two FT240-43 toroids together with epoxy, and then wrapped in glass cloth elect...

I wanted to try some POTA work, or QRP in general, so ordered up a Slidewinder DX Spike kit from M1ECC Antennas. Unfortunately, the weather hasn't been on my side for a couple of weeks, what with wind and band conditions! When the kit arrived, I was impressed as how well it was all packaged. [&helli...

I have a lot of noise on my system so am building one of GM3SEK's RF filters to see if it will help. I have wrapped the flex cables in a clip-on ferrite and two glued-together ferrites. I connected the incoming mains via a large kill switch. : and then put the components for the […]...

I wanted to be able to show my on-air status on this website and on my QRZ.com page, so set about figuring out how to do this. It appeared that Node-RED was a suitable piece of software to give me a two-way access to the radio, so I had a play on my dev PC. […]...

I wanted to do something a little more portable this weekend, so I decided to make a signal-stick-esque antenna. I ordered the following items: I deliberately bought slightly larger gauge wire than the BNC could accept as I wanted something a little thicker. This meant using some sandpaper to whittl...

Not content with a small 9:1 unun and trying different bands plus a bit of FT8, I decided to beef up my random length antenna. I bought two FT240-43 toroids (already conplemplating replacing them with 52's), a reel of enamelled 16AWG wire and some other bits and bobs, and set to work. I stacked the ...

Well, this is new for me. I decided to finally have a go at HF work. With the layout of my place, it made sense to have an end-fed long line antenna. My shack is at the front corner of the house and there's a gap to the fence, and the fence is around 25 […]...

I can't believe this is my first post of 2025! January was crazy busy. I recently change dout my shack radio, from an AnyTone D578 to a Yaesu FTM-500D. It was used, from Martin Lynch, and the price was right to grab it. I decided that the main body could go where the D578 had […]...

To celebrate my full callsign, I've rebranded the site to M0KCL.com I wanted KCL suffix but they were unavailable on foundation and intermediate. I looked at the latest export of callsigns from the end of October and saw that M0KCL was reserved, and no action since 2016. I tried to register it and i...