And now? We wait...

This is the most frustrating part - I've had the form, turned it around, and sent it back to Ofcom. The weather won't be helping with the postal service nor the staffing levels at Ofcom, and so now all I can do is wait. Their estimate over the phone was 'a week from posting', whereas their website says to allow two weeks. I'm not mouthing off about the admin or anything like that - I'm just keen to get back on the air!

I posted the form back first-class on Monday afternoon. I'd hoped that it would have arrived on Tuesday - but I called today (Weds) and the woman said that they've no record of it yet, although it could possibly be with the colleague who's off today. While I was a little disappointed, I'm not worried yet. :-)

In other news, I've recovered a couple of handheld radios out of some drawers at my Dad's QTH - one of which was the Icom he used to lend me to use while I was out with RAYNET. I helped at the move of the Belle Toute Lighthouse with that little set! I say "little set" - by today's standards the thing is a brick - but it's a brick which brings back a lot of memories for me. Good times :-)

I'm trickle charging the 2 battery packs (which barely made my multimeter flicker when I checked them) and I'm investigating the 3rd, which is marked up as a dud needing refurb. Through the course of this evening, the primary unit has gone from 0.2v to about 3½v - so by morning I hope to have it registering a lot closer to 12v. I'd like to bung the secondary pack on charge in the morning - but as I'm teaching (web design), I figured it'd be safer to wait until I got back and to do it overnight, same as the primary.

I'm really hoping that the batteries hold a charge well enough on the Icom! The tiny set (different unit) has a proprietry battery which is very difficult to get hold of nowadays, so I'm having to run it off an old phone charger until we can source a new battery.