I joined my first net, Högalandsringen.

Yesterday I had browsed for interesting nets and associations in my area and rediscovered SM6LR. It’s a ham radio club belonging to Lidköping, a town some 30km north of my QTH. The club house is at JO68pk37, to the south of Lidköping, so it’s a bit closer to me. On a whim I decided to visit them last night. To my delight I found a group of people who were very welcoming and friendly.

I’ve decided to make the website open source. I’ll add a page on how to set up a similar website for yourself, but for now, here’s the GitHub repository. I’m using Hugo to generate the website, and Cloudflare Pages to host it. Cloudflare automatically detects changes to the main branch of the github repository, and rebuilds the website. It’s pretty neat, and 100% free for my use case at the time of writing.

I sacrificed the cat door in favor of a cable passthrough.

Here I am again!

At the moment of writing I can’t really remember what brought me back to the hobby this time around.

I bought myself a new radio, the FT-891, and strung up an 80m dipole from the flagpole.

Yesterday my new family of five moved back into that very house! It’s like a dream!

I recently got introduced to DMR and bought msyelf an AnyTone D878UVII Plus, got it programmed and had my first couple of international QSOs within a day. Wonderful stuff this! Perfect entry way for hams who don’t want to get stuck on the technical side, but actually get past that mic fright.

This is my “shack” before the modification. It’s not tidy enough to earn that name, therefore the quotes. My loud computer is to the right of my nice silver mic there on the table. The side is open to reduce the need of high fan speed and the accompanying loud noise.

Today I’m multiple stage random length long wire fan antenna. Phew, that’s a mouthful.

An old mini TV combined with a Raspberry Pi can make for something completely new and different!