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.

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!