being social.

Being social, or to be more accurate being social online is a full time job. Maintaining as much of a presence that people can easily find, holding information that is both reliable and easy to obtain is an incredibly time consuming role.

For the creator it’s a worrying concept, how will people find my information? is it relevant and the channels I use to distribute my ramblings, are they sustainable?

For years now I have only focused on Twitter. The Ham community on twitter is an excellent, thriving and international group. Simply tweet with the hashtag #hamr and you will be amazed how quickly you will get engrossed.

My Facebook musings have been for my friends and people I know. It’s a place I vent my frustrations, celebrate achievements and have an online yet private presence. However I do get many Facebook friend requests and not wanting to turn people away or offend I struggle to keep my radio friends in the loop.

So the easy solution is to create a Facebook page. And that is exactly what I’ve done. You can find it here www.facebook.com/m0tgn and all my radio related ramblings will be posted on line. You can “Like” the page, and you will be kept up to speed with anything that is interesting from my neck of the woods.

This is an experiment, and I cannot guarantee its perfect, but its a good place for updates that are immediate and require more than 140 characters.

Let me know your thoughts.

GQRP / Kanga receiver

I was sent a kit this week by Kanga UK, who supplied me a new regen receiver. The kit in question makes its debut at the GQRP convention at Rishworth UK this week. Its appearance is marked by the annual buildathon.

The buildathon is a great way for anyone who has an interest in electronics, radio or has indeed has no experience in construction, build a kit and walk away with a working radio. The step by step guide we supply with the kits allows easy installation of the components and instant gratification.

I wrote the instructions for this kit and whilst doing so, I managed to video the whole build. The video is sped up, but the build actually took about 2 hours, not rushing and includes the videoing & taking pictures.

Competition time

An amazing thing happened this week. I reached 250 subscribers on YouTube. Its amazing how quickly my subscriber count has skyrocketed in recent weeks.

I watch many videos on YouTube and I have found some excellent examples of contributors that have a fresh and informative way of delivering content to their audiences. Ive also seen terrible examples too. Adding fresh content that people find informative, fun and want to watch more of is something I have been wanting to achieve for quite some time. but I just couldn’t find the topics or style of videos that I thought people would find interesting.

It turns out that what I thought might interest people and what might bore people to sleep are in fact complete opposites. So it shows what I know !!

While I struggle with thinking of new videos and fresh “relevant” content – I thought it would only be fair to celebrate this milestone with a giveaway.

I’m giving away an Acorn II SDR kit (as seen in this video). It’s a excellent Kit, easy to build and a brilliant introduction to software defined radio. Its able to receive on the 40m band straight away – but can easily be a multiband SDR with the addition of an external VFO. This kit has been kindly supplied by Dennis at Kanga Products and requires no licence to operate.

This prize is open to all subscribers of my channel (if you haven’t already subscribed – now would be a good time to) who answer the question correctly.

Simply fill in the form, answer the question correctly and press submit. Its as easy as that. The winner will be chosen and announced at random on the 10th November and the kit will be posted once I have made contact with the winner.

Good luck.

Surface mount soldering

If, like me, you have had an irrational fear of surface mount devices for some time, you will be glad to know its not as bad as you may think. I recently started working with SMD and while I suffer from shaky hands and have poor eyesight, its actually quite a methodical process and not as fiddly as you would think.

I created a 2 part video on SMD soldering using a hot air (reflow) station and using solder paste. In this video I created a QRP dummy load which is a great introduction into Surface Mount Components and at a great price of £5.95 available from Kanga Products