M5MAT

Club Accumulator

Tue, 08 Sep 2020
19
Matt, M5MAT

This is an effort to come up with a scoring system for running a club accumulator-style 'contest'. The intention is that activity over a long-ish period of time (say, 3 months) counts towards your score. Scores could be reset after that period or it could use a rolling 3-month window. The scoring should be easy to calculate programmatically from uploaded log files. Whilst it would be nice to have bonuses for things like using a homebrew rig, that can't easily be determined...

FT-857d and YT-100 tuner into an old CB whip antenna on the car outside the tent. Three evenings of FT8 while the kids were asleep resulted in 17 contacts.

Coronavirus/COVID-19 Lockdown & HF Data Modes (again)

Thu, 07 May 2020
19
Matt, M5MAT

Just a quick update on my lockdown activity...

FT8 is fully up and running now and as it's easier to use than FLDigi over a remote link I've pretty much completely switched over to that. The main change here is that I've rebuilt the shack PC. It's now running Xubuntu 18.04 LTS like the laptop I use for UKAC portable operation - however I have decided to keep the base OS as stock as possible. This means that all the radio apps are running in docker containers. So far I have the...

Coronavirus/COVID-19 Lockdown & HF Data Modes

Thu, 02 Apr 2020
19
Matt, M5MAT

Like most of the country, and indeed the world, I'm currently stuck at home due to coronavirus. Most of my radio kit lives in the car most of the time for UKAC contests, and general commuter-mobile use. As that won't be happening for the foreseeable future I've moved the FT-857d into the garage, hooked it up to a G5RV Jr antenna which is strung up in the roof of the garage (via my YT-100 tuner) and also to an X200 dual-band colinear. The G5RV is all of 3m agl (possibly 4m if I'm being...

GPS and SMS messaging via APRS on Motorola MotoTRBO radios

Tue, 21 Jan 2020
19
Matt, M5MAT

The following information is mostly derived from a hamdigitaal.nl article and is only for use on the Brandmeister Network - this will not work on Phoenix UK or any other networks.

Firstly, you need to know your local Brandmeister master node id. The UK node is 2341 (list here). The ID that we need to use...

More on the callsign changing saga

Mon, 13 Jan 2020
19
Matt, M5MAT

I was going to post the following to the UK VHF Contesting group, until I thought better of it and decided not to poke the hornet's nest...

A bit of a warning to those who intend to upgrade or otherwise change callsign, and care about your UKAC results... You need to do it at the end of a year.

I upgraded to a full license a the RSGB Convention last year. Due to errors at Ofcom I've been issued a few different callsigns over...

Thu, 09 Jan 2020
19
Matt, M5MAT

In September 2019 I passed my full license exam. Yay me. After the result was confirmed I filled in a paper application so that I could request a specific callsign - M5MAT (the online system doesn't allow you to request a particular callsign).

As far as I could tell that callsign was available - it wasn't registered on QRZ.com, it didn't come up as being assigned in recent Ofcom FoIA responses and nothing showed up when searching for it on Google, Twitter etc.

After paying...

2019 Wrap-up

Tue, 31 Dec 2019
19
Matt, M5MAT

Stats

Total QSOs - 1225, about double 2018 total.

Contests Entered - 20 (10 × 2m UKAC, 10 × 70cm UKAC)

UKAC Final Position - 111/697 overall (10/203 on 2m, and 2nd place intermediate station, 13/151 on 70cm), last year was 304/733 (49/210 on 2m)

Notable QSOs

G3MXH (2019-08-06) - Terry, G3MXH helped me pass my novice exam 20-odd years ago and did much to help my...
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MØIZZ

Tue, 19 Nov 2019
19
Matt, MØIZZ

I'm now MØIZZ!

After a fair amount of wrangling with Ofcom, including being issued G2KS for a period of 49 minutes, they have finally ignored my request for M5MAT and issued me MØIZZ. This callsign breaks a few of my self-imposed rules, notable it has a repeating character (Z) and also the twitter username @M0IZZ is not available, so on twitter I'll be @M0IZZ_Matt.

Rules for a Good Callsign

Mon, 14 Oct 2019
19
Matt, 2E1HNK

Having passed my full license exam, and now that you can essentially pick whichever (unissued) callsign you want, my mind has turned to trying to work out how to define a 'good' callsign. What I settled on is...

Callsign should not contain character combinations that are used for other purposes, e.g. 'CQ'
Callsign should not end in 'K', as that could be confusing in Morse.
For Morse, shorter (i.e. fewer dots and dashes) is better, and...
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