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As predicted by my itinerary, today has been a pretty boring day, with far too long spent in airport departure lounges. The trip to Iquique involves three flights: London-Madrid, Madrid-Santiago, Santiago-Iquique. Unfortunately flight availability conspired against me, even though I booked the flights in March, and so each of the connections was incredibly long. All…
As some of you might be aware, I’m going travelling in Chile for most of November and December. This isn’t a radio DXpedition as I can only take one 23kg suitcase to last 6 weeks and clothes and camping stuff have to take priority! That said, I do have a Chilean licence, and I am taking…
That’s it. At 01:30 UTC on 17th July, we finished our DXpedition to Svalbard. So, how did we do? The raw numbers On the face of it, this wasn’t our most successful DXpedition in terms of QSO count. During the six full days we were QRV, we only made 6305 contacts between the six of us.…
While we’re in Svalbard, we’re operating from the JW5E shack, the local radio club cabin. I’m also sleeping here, so I thought I’d give a quick introduction to what’ it’s like to stay at the station, which can be rented by other radio amateurs. For official information on the station, see jw5e.com Before going any further, I…
After our trip to Barentsberg a couple days previously, yesterday we went to Pyramiden, named after the Pyramid-shaped mountain above the town. Like Barentsberg, this is a Russian coal-mining settlement. Unlike Barentsberg, however, Pyramiden is a ghost town. Or almost a ghost town. The mine closed in 1997. Under the Svalbard Treaty, if a settlement…
Yesterday, Rob M0VFC, Steve M1ACB and I left the rest of the group in the shack while we took a trip to the Russian settlement of Barentsberg here on Svalbard. The excursion was organised by Svalbard Travel and is moderately expensive, but well worth the cost for a long day on a boat with an…
After two flights (London – Oslo, then Oslo – Longyearbyen), we’ve arrived in Svalbard. This is the view from the shack, taken just after we arrived (about 00:30 local time). The midnight sun is very real! The first surprise, we have mobile phone signals and the shack has internet. So, our fears about lack of…
From 10th-17th July 2015, I will be one of six operators activating the JW5E shack on Svalbard. We’ll be operating on 40m-10m (and maybe some 6m if conditions allow), mainly on SSB and CW, using JW/{homecall}. We won’t arrive in Longyearbyen until late in the evening of Friday 10th, and we depart very early in the morning on…
As some of you may know, I’ve been involved in Cambridge 105’s ‘Pirate Cambridge 105’ special event – a 12-hour live broadcast from a riverboat moored on the River Cam, intended to celebrate and reminisce about the golden era of Pirate Radio. In keeping with the theme, we limited ourselves to only using equipment from…
This article is my own synthesis of ideas presented at Lean Agile Scotland in September 2014 by Dan North, Jabe Bloom and Torbjörn Gyllebring, with some of my own embellishments. Any misunderstanding of their points is mine! I’ve linked to their original talks at the foot of this post. Conway’s Law says that the design…