The board's banner photograph features the famous Cullen Railway Viaduct.
In the summer, Cullen is packed with "heritage" tourists who come to soak up the atmosphere, visit the numerous whisky distilleries which abound all over Moray - my favourite is the Chivas Brothers distillery at Keith - and imagine what the old days were like. As a long, and full-time Cullen resident, the sense of community in Cullen is really great, and I would never consider moving back to a city.
We live in the Seatown part of Cullen which is where the fishermen (mainly herring) https://www.morayconnections.co.uk/cull ... age-group/ used to bide in the old days. The houses are wee, very old - ours is over 200 years old with 2 foot thick stone walls - and closely packed, so no room for Beverages, HF Beams, half wave HF Dipoles etc, but I can still get out on HF with 100 watts especially on 40m using mainly digi-modes such as JS8Call & Olivia.
I was first licensed as G8JCF in August 1974. I operated on 2M for 12 months with a converted Pye Cambridge AM10B with a half-wave dipole in the loft, (no morse, no HF, back then), then went to University, got a job, got a mortgage, got married, had kids, left me no time for Amateur Radio !!
I came back into the hobby in 2003 when I wrote the G8JCFSDR Software Defined Radio see https://g8jcfsdr.g8jcf.uk
Since 1974, things have become so much more relaxed licensing-wise - no more morse restriction - I got relicensed in February 2013 as GM8JCF, and rediscoverd what had brought me into Amateur Radio, and a long career in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, (https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2173618A/en), Software Engineering and Computers - the wonderment that I could hear people from all over the world on a bit of wire that my father rigged up when I was 7 years old, I spent hours with that old radiogram tuning around being thrilled when I heard foreign unintelligble voices - remember this was in the early 60s when a phone call to Ceylon had to be arranged 2 days in advance and cost an absolute fortune.
These days, I work mostly digital modes especially Olivia https://olctl.g8jcf.uk and JS8 on 40 & 80.
The current station comprises for HF:
- ICOM 7200
- AVIR AV-908 Mic
- Homebrew PC headset
- LDG AT11-MP
- Maas SP-50 II PSU
- 22m End fed via a 9:1 unun - dog legged around the garden and roof
- Baofeng UV-5RTP+Nagoya NA-771 Antenna, 8 W HT for 2M/70cm
Anyway, many years later, I discovered that lots of "cold war warrior" radios were becoming available for very reasonable prices, and I could finally have one of those synthesised receivers - trouble is, once you get one, you need to make a collection !!
So I ended up with
- Racal RA 1792
- Rockwell Collins HF 2050
- Harris RF 590
- Plessey PRS 2282A
- Watkins Johnson WJ 8712
- Cubic Communications 3280 (10KHz - 30MHz)
- Cubic Communications 3580 (20MHz - 1.2GHz)
- Fairhaven RD 500 (10kHz to 1.75GHz)
- CUBIC Astro-D
I discovered the Software Defined Receiver, "SDR", concept in 2003 when PCs were becoming just powerful enough to start doing DSP in high level languages - the seminal work for me was https://www.arrl.org/files/file/Technol ... qex013.pdf by Gerald Youngblood, AC5OG, founder of FlexRadio, which spurred me to create the G8JCFSDR starting in 2003/4 https://g8jcfsdr.g8jcf.uk.
As a result I have several SDR h/w front-ends :
- DRT1
- DRB30
- DRB32
- PMSDR
- FiFi SDR
- Elektor 3/2004
- Elektor 5/2007
- Elektor 7/2016 SDR Reloaded
- Pappradio V1 & V2
For receive-only purposes I use a M0AYF active loop antenna which has performed excellent service for these past 15 years, and lasted very well considering the salt laden air, (we've been through 3 cars in that time), gale-force winds, and harsh winters we get up here in North East Scotland.
Please feel free to contact me via the Private Message feature on the board.
73
Peter - GM8JCf