From a tin shed on wheels...

Got on to the SARS net again last night once I'd got home from teaching, and was operating from the car-rig setup on my driveway. I put in a couple of overs, then we had a little debate as to whether I should report /Mobile or not. When I was last licensed, you didn't have to report mobile as long as you were within the boundaries of your licensed property, which - being on the driveway - I was. I wasn't sure whether this had changed at all in recent times, so I asked and the consensus was that operating from a parked car within the boundaries of the property was no different to operating from a garden shed... just one made of metal, with wheels! :-)

Working 10W out of the car on the Icom IC-260E and a whippy aerial was a huge improvement on working 1W off the tiddly yet very useful VX-1 handheld. Steve and I had a great deal of trouble working each other last week, however this week I was (quote) "blowing the windows out" with a 5/9+ signal. I'm very pleased with that, as I'm not in the best of locations at home. With VHF field-day this weekend, I might get on top of the hill and see what and where I can work from that little vantage point.

Can't wait to find out what this little setup is really capable of :-)

Methinks it is webware time

I went on an SQL course back in May-ish 2009, and have been looking for a project to make good use of it on. I've messed about a bit with creating a "caught/seen/failed" Pokédex, but haven't done anything really useful so far.

So - with getting back on the air (and subject to whatever the rules are now - should be made available to me at the same time as my licence is re-instated) I'm thinking that I might write myself some logging webware which also generates RSS feeds, stats, and so on. I'd then test it out for a bit, maybe put out a Beta, then release it for free (or ad-supported) download.

I'm going to start off with basic call-logging, then hopefully build in other tables to take care of callsign-locating etc. and additional queries for "busiest day of the week", "busiest time of day" and the like. Anyone interested or want to suggest any features? :-)