Author Archives: Toby White

About Toby White

I'm a doer!

Getting back into (Amateur) Radio!

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I thought I’d try and write something a little more positive… I passed my Intermediate Amateur Radio Licence exam today! 😀

For those that don’t know I’ve been a licensed amateur radio operator since 2004 (M3GGV). I was quite keen for a little while but I was also still very young (14), and a lot of “life” happened after that, meaning that my priorities and focus turned to many other things. In fact, I more or less forgot about it. I did return for a little while in 2012 but I think at the time the biggest thing was that I was short of a few pennies (not that you really needed much) and my interests soon turned into other things like rock music and nightlife, mixed in with focussing on my GCSEs, A Levels , and then Apprenticeship… followed by jobs and chasing girls.

Twenty years later, and I’m now settled, married, and have two cats.  One of the big reasons of getting back into the hobby though, is that the amateur radio crowd are generally a very friendly bunch; there are clubs in nearly every town countrywide, and a lot of the tech stuff ties in quite nicely with my career in IT. I’m hoping to meet more people in person away from anything work related though, which is something I’ve missed for a long time. Norfolk is great, but it does lack live music venues.

I digress… a lot has changed with the licencing of amateur radio since I took my Foundation. For a start you can do a lot more with the Foundation course than you used to be able to and work on a lot more bands and with a lot more power. Not that power is everything. I think this was a very good move to get more people into the hobby.

The second thing is that you can do courses remotely (thanks mosly to Covid). For the Foundation you can check out Essex Ham who offer a 3 week training course. This will get you started in the hobby.

For the Intermediate and Advanced levels you can check out Bath Based Distance Learning who I used to train and prepare me for the exam. The Intermediate is quite a step up from the Foundation. I hadn’t done any proper study or revision or exam work since my GCSEs in 2006 and it was a bit of a shock to the system, but I did want to push myself. In total I guesstimate that I probably spent 91hrs for the study over 13 or 14 weeks, which worked out at about 50% of every weekend since January and a couple of hours on a Monday evening to do a mock exam.  There’s quite a lot of maths and I needed extra tutition to get my maths GCSE to get me over the line, and a lot of the “basic” electronics isn’t so basic in my mind at least.

Anyway, I’m off to do some radio shopping. I’ve got my 2m/70cm radio sorted. I’ve got a Yaesu 2800M and a FT7800 dual bander that I still need to plug in and use. I have yet to try and make a contact on 70cm so now the course is done I can get my radio sorted. The current antenna for this setup is a Moonraker Supergainer on the roof of the house.

Moonraker Supergainer dual band on the roof

Moonraker Supergainer dual band on the roof

For HF, I’m now in a very lucky position to be able to run a wire so will probably go for an End Fed Half Wave from UK Antennas like this one

Radio-wise. I’m doing research on the ICOM 7300 or Yaesu FT-710. The debate seems to be a big one. See here on Reddit.

 

I’d like to give an honourable mention to Shefford and District Amateur Radio Society with whom I did the Foundtation Course training and exam with 22 years ago. Without them advertising at my school I would never have gotten involved in this.

I’ll be posting more on this topic at a later date. Hope to catch you on the air soon!

Keep on trucking – end of year wrap!

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Fruit trees in garden

Newly planted fruit trees in our garden!

I must first apologise for not writing more on my personal blog. I have various separate sites for more specific topics, so tend to split the writing accordingly.  I also write a lot more in a private diary, as there is a lot I don’t necessarily want to share publicly.

It’s a very cold morning today and I am finishing up with my e-filing.

I’ve been avoiding it for a little while, but the end of this year (2025) has been 5 years since my cancer diagnosis. I guess I am one of those luckier individuals and sometimes that’s hard to grasp. For the whole of 2020 and the duration of my surgery and treatment, I really wasn’t focused on much else other than getting through a long and brutal chemo reigime. I think it’s fair to say that’s what it was… This followed by a very stressful and bad return to work which resulted me leaving my previous job for a new one, and ultimely lead to the previous periods being a bit of a blur. I can only thank my beautiful wife and loving family for being there and supporting me, even though they may not have always understood what was going on in my head.

I suffered a lot of survivor guilt and PTSD from my experiences and this only really improved after getting some proper counselling. I would recommend this to anyone who’s gone through or experienced any trauma of any kind. Us men do tend to bottle things up. It’s not worth it. I felt really lonely for a long time as after so much hospital time and the Covid situation, I spent more time with nurses and doctors and HCAs and then that was all gone. I can understand how people get institutionalised as I fear that’s what I got. I wouldn’t wish what I went through on my worst enemy – that’s the honest truth – but I lost over nearly 10+ months of close socialisation. Probably more socialisation that I’d had in years. It’s difficult doing the adulting thing. I would love to be back at 18 and having nothing much to worry about and being out and drinking with my friends. Then that all falls apart.

Folowing this all, I did reach out to a good friend I’d not seen in many years and have had the pleasure of meeting up several times since. Good friends are hard to find, so reconnecting with old ones if possible is very worthwhile.

In 2025, I made some headways with getting back on track. I spent a LOT of time working on our garden. I learnt to fix a lawnmower, something I never had to do, but had to out of necessity. I did a charity walk up Snowdon with my Sister and raised a lot of money for BCRT, a great cause. I also did an interview with David Dolling’s Project 71 video series. You can check that here: https://youtu.be/TCrSFigbnMs?si=a8i90npYbxx4MTlG

We met up with friends throughout the summer, and made the most of the great and prolonged warm weather.

I did some more YouTube videos and updates for my garage Home Mechanic pages and worked on my freelance work Frantik. I also made an effort to work on writing more posts on all my blogs, and stop being complacent.

I’m also hoping to complete my Intermediate Amateur Radio course in 2026. It’s a real challenge with a lot more focus on electronics. Challenging myself and doing things I haven’t attempted yet are a real focus for me.

In early December, it brought great pleasure to me to plant some new fruit trees in our garden. In a few years these will bring us some great produce. (See picture).

I’ve written a lot now, so enough rambling. Time to keep on trucking!

Happy New Year!

That’s a wrap! 🙂

 

A Little Life – a short summary for a long novel

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Cover of the novel A Little Life

Cover of the novel A Little Life

I’ve just finished reading this wonderfull, albeit at times very depressing, novel. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, as my wife handed me another book to read back in September. She hadn’t read it either, so I was going in totally blind.

I didn’t do any research into what the book was about either, and I won’t be going into too much detail here either, other to say that it really was something quite different. It’s probably the only book that has made me cry, that I can think of. It also made me laugh and smile at others. It really was a rollercoaster ride of emotions!

It was also quite long at over 700 pages of reasonably small print. I have read some long books before (Le Mis) but not a modern time novel.

A short plot summary from Wikipedia with no plot spoilers:

Set primarily in New York City, the story chronicles the lives of four friends as they grapple with substance abuse, sexual assault and depression.

Having researched a little more following finishing this, I learnt that it’s sold over a million copies (that’s a lot of books). It was then written as a stage play a number of times. The 2003

This is one of the only books I thought deserved a longer post, as it truely enamoured me. I can certainly see it being analysed in English Lit classes worldwide, if not being done so already. It’s a bit of a slow burn to start out with but it really draws you in and once you’re a 1/4 of the way in you really need to keep on going. The writing style and brilliance required to build up such detail about so many characters is impressive. Like any good film, you may have to read it more than once to pick up all the detail. but I might advise that you give it a while inbetween reads…

Noteably this was my 10th book read this year, and with being quite busy with house/car(s)/family/jobs and life, I was quite pleased with. I had set a 10 book challenge on Goodreads after reducing that number from the following two years, so was pleased I had made that 🙂