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Just of late I have come to the decision that I am really not enjoying Amateur Radio anymore.
I have tried to have quite a few CW conversations of late, but I seem to hit the same problems, either the operator on the other end refuses or doesn’t know how to slow down to a speed that I can copy and also sending at, or that all they are interested in is a ‘599 and bye’, maybe just because they are using macro’s in software such as Ham Radio Deluxe or N1MM, even my favorite Logging Software which is UcxLOG allows you to setup macro’s, along with most modern radios themselves.
With the reference to slowing down, I know that the Yaesu FTdx-101MP can decode CW, but it is a bit of a faf to get it working, and unless the operator on the other end is sending really well and does not have any bad habits, the 101MP is still not as good as your ears, and I am not too good at the moment with regards to copying CW, but I still kept trying at least.
It is not just this that is annoying me at the moment, I am not happy with the Yaesu, I cannot pinpoint what it is that annoys me, it is kind of a load of little things that I am not happy with:
- Waterfall Colours cannot be set to something that I like, why you have to choose from some really grotty pre-sets I do not know. What would be perfect here is to change this so that the user can setup exactly what they would like, personally I would love to set this up to look the same as the Elecraft P3, that would do me.
- If you do select ‘CW Decode’ why can it not automatically work out the speed and make the changes for you, surely these days this would be fairly simple.
- ‘DNR’, the Digital Noise Reduction is pretty dam good and one of the best features of this radio but I just think that Icom have it perfect, I ran this up next to my trusty old Icom 775DSP, and the Icom was I think a bit better, yes the Yaesu was a lot faster, selecting filters on the old Icom is a bit of a pain to use compared to the Yaesu, but the Icom IC-775DSP was made when the dinosaurs were still walking around.
- I am not into these compressed radios, and by that I mean the size, the ultimate example of this is the popular Icom IC-7300, I had one of these which I totally hated and in the end I used it for a door stop, on top of the size, I also hated the audio, compared to the Yaesu FTdx-10 or even the FT-710, it was horrible, and I really like Icom Radio’s (except the IC-7300), I never got to try out the Icom IC-7610, but even this is not like the old large format radios that Icom used to be really good at.
- Yaesu’s always are quirky but the FTdx-101MP is a really monster in this respect, and I never really like the manuals that come with these radio’s, I always find that Yaesu do not explain things like Icom’s and other makes do, this is a very minor issue but it might as well go on the list.
- Cheap Speaker Units, and by this I mean that you buy an empty box with a shit little speaker inside it that costs a bloody fortune, it should only cost around £20 really, but they love ripping us Ham Operators off.
Anyway I just really lost the enjoyment of Ham Radio, and my health is going backwards again so I am not sure just how long I have, after all Terminal Cancer is Terminal and although I have a periodic rest with immunotherapy the outcome is still sketchy, and the main problem here is with what Clatterbridge did to me with the Radiotherapy in destroying my throat and killing all my taste buds and along with it my saliva glands, my only enjoyment that I have left was Ham Radio, well this is not exactly true, The real enjoyment is restoration, fixing, along with cleaning and servicing of old test equipment and radios. I did enjoy servicing old equipment using old test equipment that was possibly used back then, and then comparing this to newer test equipment which was usually quite shocking, sometimes literally, the other fun bit was the fact that you are playing with stupidly high voltages when it comes to vacuum tubes, most of the times over 400v and sometimes up to nearly 2,400v in the case of my old Henry Amplifier that I am really going to have to deconstruct to get the schematic diagram from, but in all cases it is the whole chase that is fun.
Anyway I had a friend visit who wanted to buy a few Linear Amplifiers off me, and he was telling me about another friend that he has back home that really would like to have a good setup, so with me feeling really pissed with it all I donated the FTdx-101MP to his friend as I know that it is going to a good home and that it will not just be sold on, anyway as we got chatting I started to go through a lot of old RUB boxes that I have here and he made me good offers on everything. I suppose that I could have sold this all locally but as I now know just one local who is a good friend but he would not offer me as good a pricing as my friend from Gosport has, and also at the end of the day it has all gone to a good home and not just to make a good profit, although I did on a few items. At the end of the day, it is one hobby gone and another one started (again), in that I will soon be able to buy a new camera, and much better than I first hoped for.
So, what does this mean for the website?
Well, I was thinking of just keeping it running as after all I have all the PDF’s uploaded anyway, but it is the updates to the website that are getting tiring, and the cost, the later being the monster. The site past the 1Tb stage a few months back, it now is on a dedicated Server with Cloud Backup, but all this costs a small fortune, presently it costs me around £270 per month, and I get on average around £15 a month in registrations to download over 2600 downloads of various documents, I would be happier if the registrations or the very rare occurrence of a donation would go some way to help me run the site, but I don’t get enough to cover the site at all, and at the moment with dedicated servers and cloud servers, etc and the amount of data that I have uploaded that is costing me a small fortune each month.
I thought that if I made the membership a ridiculously small amount, then amateurs would not mind paying this small amount to have access to the data, I was so wrong, I presently have just 473 users, which makes me laugh as I receive on average 1000 emails regarding that all this information should be Free to Download and that I should just be happy with donations, thankfully I have now setup rules to remove all these and others, but it seems that even a ridiculously small amount of £5 is too much for many, which makes me wonder if it is worth putting all the work into creating and updating the web pages.
So, what I am going to do is close off all new registrations and slowly delete all of the documentation on the website, if I can get the site down to a few hundred Mb then I can lose the Cloud backups and even loose the Server running costs by shifting to a shared server, and for what I need, that will do and it will also allow me to save up for new camera equipment.
This will take a lot of pressure off my shoulders, especially at present, I am being set PDF’s of files that are missing from sections such as the KW Radio, Heathkit, and the AntenneX Section which I never updated myself as there would have been a further 2,812 files to upload, that alone was over 6Gb. All of this and many other sections would take me ages to upload, prepare pages and posts for, even updating simple pages such as the Heathkit or AntenneX Downloads can take a few hours or even a few days.
I originally created the site to try and keep a record of all local hams past and present, but with a total lack of interest from locals I soon gave this up, well I have come to the decision of taking the site down a peg or two and putting it on a diet.
Another thing that I have not mentioned is my health, at the end of the day I am fighting “Terminal Cancer” and until they say that it is gone, then I am still going through it all, my heath in general is better than it has been, I am now getting to the point where I can walk small distances, although I am sure that I look pissed most of the time, but the biggest issue I have is still my throat and the lack of saliva and taste buds, and even though I keep mentioning this to nearly every one that I know, they all seem to think that is a small problem, but just try this for a day, eat nothing but cardboard, and three times a day you have to have liquid pumped into you, either by hand or by using an automatic pump, and as well as all that you can only drink about a cup of coffee once a day, and whatever you eat you get no enjoyment from anyway, everything tastes of cardboard, and the coffee needs to be made quite strong so that I cannot taste the water as it resembles ‘licking out an ash tray’, not that I have ever tried it, but I am sure that is what I taste if I taste water, thanks Clatterbridge for ruining my life.
So I really do not want to deal with heavy items any more, however nice they are, and I have tried VHF, UHF, and SHF, and it is just the same lot of bollocks, no one wants to chat and especially on SHF it was the same 5 people every day and they let you know what antenna they are using and then repeat it every day that you contact them until you get so bored at them repeating the same thing every day, I have done the HF thing and I kind of hoped that this may be a little different, more civilised maybe, but alas not, so the arrival of my friend from Gosport came at the right time and he gave me a good price, certainly more than I could have got from Martin Lynch or the likes of, and before you know it, one item is sold, then 10, and maybe 100, lost count, but a lot of stuff went along with boxes and boxes of books and manuals, and then the parlour was bare and I have a nice clean office for a change.
U-Turn!
I did not think that my ‘Shitty’ little website and what I did to it would matter to the outside world – BUT! I have received as of today well over 400 e-mails begging me to put all the pages back up.
I was a bit chocked up by all the kind words, so I have spent the last few days trying to put the material back together, thankfully I had left a lot of the data uploaded and only removed all the menu structure, but even sorting this out has been a little on the fun side.
So, I have taken note, and I will try and not only maintain all the present pages, but I will also try my best to update all of the pages with missing and new versions of the documentation that I have not had the chance to update.
As for the kind words about my Ham Radio Gear, I have of course kept all of the vintage Vacuum Tube Related gear, a lot of this has a sentimental notch in my heart as it either came from dear friends that are now Silent Key, or from Locals that I am truly thankful for or from contacts on the Internet that I hope that I can call friends, either way I have kindly been sent quite a few old radios that I now cherish. I have though streamlined what I did have, I did have new radios such as the FTDX-101MP, and a few nice radios such as an old Icom IC-775DSP and a Ten-Tec Orion Mark 1 that I have given away as gifts to some amateurs that have kindly sent me stuff in the past and have since kept in contact with. I also got rid of a large quantity of Linear Amplifiers, at one point I had 17 that I could find of various sizes, and some even brand new and never un boxed, and I managed to find someone that was kind enough to make a sizeable donation to my Camera Fund, this has also given me a lot of space to enable me to hopefully make the new workshop.
Thank you so very much, it has meant a hell of a lot to me.
Last Updated : 2nd August 2024
