G4FPH's Amateur Radio Pages

Hello! This is Mark, G4FPH, sending greetings from the county of Staffordshire, in central England ('The Midlands'). Welcome to my website celebrating 50 years of licensed transmission in amateur radio, 1976 - 2026.

Feel free to browse the whole site. The site is written in pure html and so it should work with any browser. The preferred font for display is 'Inter', but there I've included some fallbacks too. Use your browser's 'Forward' and 'Back' buttons to navigate around.

This website is very much a work-in-progress (a.k.a. a bit of a mess)! I shall be adding and editing content, including lots of pictures from my archives, as and when time and enthusiasm permit. Coding webpages in a text editor is hard work - reminds me of writing assembler code for 8-bit microprocessors, which I actually enjoyed - but my attempts to learn a CMS software in 20 minutes failed, so here we are! At present, some pages have just been carried forward as-is from my radio website of 20 years ago and are yet to be re-edited.

The picture below was taken from the lane just out the north-end of our village. It's hard to see the village through all the trees! It gives some impression of why we are in an area of the country often referred to as the 'Trent Valley'. Trent is the River Trent, our nearest major watercourse. On the horizon, you can just make out the radio tower situated at a place called 'Pye Green' in the Cannock Chase forest - a beautiful place, recognised oficially as a UK Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). Pye Green tower was one of several erected up and down the UK as part of an alternative telecoms network in the Cold War period of our history. Now it supports only a very few radio broadcast and busines mobile radio aerials. I wish my aerials for VHF and UHF were up there, instead of being down here!

The intro...

I was originally licenced in November 1976, at age 15, whist still a schoolboy. This callsign is the only one I have ever been issued with, so I'm both used to it and very fond of it. Now, at age 65 years, I am either an 'old-timer' already, or not far off being one. A student of Electrical and Electronic Enginnering, former Chartered Engineer and fairly recently retired from a career that spanned a very brief period in the motor vehicle manufacturing industry, followed by the bread-and-butter that was maintaining, designing, installing, managing and advising on the technology and workflows of media (mainly TV) production and broadcasting facilities.

I am interested in conversational-style phone operations on HF and (portable) on the VHF bands, especially 160, 80, 60, 40, 20, 17, 10 and 2 metres. I enjoy maintaining and operating state-of-the-art, computer-dependent, SDR transceivers and also state-of-the-art (as it was in the 1970s and '80s), no computer required, analogue transceivers, plus their usual accessories. I engage with the odd contest from time-to time, but am not so foolish as to believe my signals really are 5/9 in all those far-off places. Can't see me ever owning a digital voice mode VHF / UHF transceiver, or thinking contacts made using FT8 and similar minimal signal, minimal exchange modes represent worthwhile communications. In general, the less information passed over a communications channel, the less I seem interested in being a party to it. I suppose that implies I am more of a 'quality' over 'quantity' type of amateur and with a bias toward engineering more than operating.

I keep up the homebrew side of the hobby, mainly aerials, station accessories and long-term linear amplifier projects. I like to talk on the air about matters pertinent to the 'self-training in the art of wireless telegraphy', as it said in my original licence! I'm not averse to using the airwaves to arrange a trip down the pub with radio friends though! In my mind and junkboxes, I have a backlog of several hundred radio-related projects that would be interesting to get done. After 50 years trying, I am coming around to the view that not all of them will be. How I select which project I will focus on at any given time remains a mystery to me, but if something breaks on which I rely regularly, it usually gets priority.

Amateur radio is today typically described as a hobby, pastime and leisure interest. It is and has always been all of those things, of course, otherwise it would be 'professional' radio. For many an old-timer like me, however, there's more to it than that. Yes, considerably more important that just another pick-up, then throw-away-and-move-on pastime. Amateur radio, and the science, technology and engineering that underpins it, has to me across all these 50 years been an education, passion, religion and (possibly) an obsession. A source of pleasure, sometimes frustration and the odd near-death experience. The original social network, peppered with interesting characters, some of whom became lifelong friends. A gateway into technical studies, meeting my wife, having an interesting career and a good start to retirement!

Send an e-mail to g4fph@mjha.co.uk to arrange a sked or what have you?

If you need it for any reason, I have a page on QRZ.com, but intend to put most of the serious content on this, my own site. QRZ page for G4FPH

Most recent contacts from the logbook of UK Amateur Radio station G4FPH

Current station setup

HF: Transceiver (main): Apache Labs ANAN-7000DLE MKII SDR, running 'Thetis' operating software on Microsoft Windows OS and Intel NUC PC hardware. Linear amplifier is an SPE Expert 2K-FA. The shack PC is also the focal point for other software that serves to integrate the various station functions and components, such as logbook, aerial rotator control, data modes, etc.
HF: Transceivers (vintage): I own and enjoy maintaining and operating a modest collection of transceivers from the 1970s and early 1980s. With luck, you might just catch me on air using something from Heathkit, Atlas, Drake, Ten-Tec, Yaesu, Skanti, etc.
HF Aerial 1: Homebrew Delta Fed Half Wave (DFHW). Essentially a 260 ft. long horizontal wire, suspended between two, 65 ft. tall poplar trees. It has a 'crafty', balanced feed arrangement resulting in a good match to 200 Ohm on 160, 60, 15 and 10 metre bands. A four-to-one (4:1) current balun is used to transition to 50 Ohm coax cable back to the aerial switching unit.
HF Aerial 2: Homebrew 180 ft. long, inverted-V, doublet, centre at 50 ft. Aerial length and installation height and the length and characteristic impedance of the two-wire, balanced feeder chosen carefully resulting in a good match to 50 Ohm on 80 and 40 metre bands. A one-to-one current balun is used to transition to 50 Ohm coax cable back to the aerial switching unit.
HF Aerial 3: Homebrew 'Spiderbeam', installed on a 36 ft. lattice tower, with an AlfaSpid RAK rotator. Based on the commercially available design. This aerial comprises a horizontal cross (+) of fibreglass spreader poles, measuring approximately 32 ft. tip-to-tip. Across these spreaders are stretched three individial, interleaved wire Yagi-Uda beams - a three element one for 20m, a three element one for 17m and a four element one for 10 m band. The driven elements of the three beams share a common feedpoint and the geometry and other parameters of the aerials give a good match to 50 Ohm. A one-to-one current balun is used to transition to 50 Ohm coax back to the aerial switching unit.
HF Aerial Switching: A 5-way, commercial unit by Ameritron (type RCS-8V). It allows remote (from the shack) routing of any one of the three aerials above onto the long, coaxial feeder back to the shack.
HF Feeder: The main feeder run between the aerial field and the shack is Andrew LDF4-50A Heliax cable.

VHF and UHF: A number of FM-only transceivers are available for the two metre and seventy centimetre amateur bands, but they are are not left permanently connected to the aerial. Instead, the aerial (a two-element, dual-band co-linear mounted on the chimney of the house) is generally left connected to Internet accessible Receiver 3 (OpenWebRX+) (see below).

Internet accessible receivers

I operate three Internet-accessible receivers from home. These receivers are always being poked and prodded by me, so may not be on-line / usable at any particular time. Receiver 3 may have only a VHF and UHF aerial connected to it, if so, you will hear next to nothing outside of these bands.

Receiver 1: This receiver runs WebSDR software by Pieter-Tjerk de Boer, PA3FWM. It has a maximum simultaneous user count of 20. It used to be topband only, but now switches between 160 and 80 metre bands across the day and week. I've set the switching times in an effort to please most of the people, most of the time.
Receiver 2: This receiver also runs WebSDR software by Pieter-Tjerk. It too has a maximum simultaneous user count of 20. It switches between 80 and 40 metre bands across the day and week. [Note to self: It used to switch between 60 and 40 metres, so revert it to that?!] Again, I've tried to set the switching times such as to make the receiver of most use to groups and individuals that use these bands regularly.
Receiver 3: This receiver runs OpenWebRX+ software by Marat Fayzullin. It has a maximum simultaneous user count of four and it's main purpose if to provide reception of those parts of the spectrum that none of the other receivers here do. Listeners can select the frequency band to they listen to, but bear in mind that if one listener changes the band it changes for all listeners! This receiver works on various amateur and broadcast VHF and UHF bands only until I find the diplexer and cable to add HF back to it also.
Receiver 4: I am also sysop for a fourth internet accessible receiver, located near Derby, about 30 miles NE of here. This receiver also runs WebSDR software and is strictly a 160 metre only configuration.

Click on the icons below to open a new web browser tab for the relevant receiver.

Stafford - 160 / 80 metres	Stafford - 80 / 40 metres	Stafford - General coverage	Derby - 160 metre only

Receiver 1: 160 / 80	Receiver 2: 80 / 40	Receiver 3: General	Remote: 160 only

Old QSL Card gallery

Back in the dark ages, people on holiday used to write and send postcards to those not on holiday. Radio amateurs did something similar, except that holidays were not mandatory and often both parties to a particular communication over the airwaves would send a card to the other. These customised 'postcards, known as 'QSL' cards, noted transmission and reception conditions and only sometimes the weather. I was never a massive sender, nor receiver, of QSL cards. Predictably, I exchanged more during my early years in the hobby. Of course, there are electronic / modern equivalents thesedays but, with those, the physical 'wall-art' aspect is lost.

UK	Europe	North America	South America	USSR	Other and SWL

UK	Europe	North America	South America	USSR	Other and SWL

My early days in Amateur Radio

The pre-transmitting / pre-licensed years	Radio clubs and experiments	Studying for 'the ticket'	26 November, 1976

Getting the bug	Locals and friends	Helping hands	The big day arrives

Reelin' in the years: Tales and pictures from my past 50 years in Amateur Radio (work in progress)

1976 - 1979	1980 - 1989	1990 - 1999	2000 - 2009	2010 - 2019	2020 - current

Early days	The eighties	The nineties	The naughties	The tens	More recently

Content from previous G4FPH website

Racal TTA 1885A	Henry 2000D-27 Linear Amplifier	The Shack 20 years ago	Radios	Amplifiers	Aerials	Projects	Worked All Chip Shops

Old transmitter	Old amplifier	Radio man-cave, 2003	Tools of the trade	Keeping warm	Connecting to the aether	Projects	The antedote to awards

Useless, old and hopelessly broken links

Check out the Links (Do all web sites have to have these?!)

And the outro...

I hope you have enjoyed browsing this website. I'll add more content and pretty it up over time.

Sadly, in recent years, there's been a lot of doom and gloom about the future of amateur radio as a 'thing'. A visitor, seeing the aerials in my garden, asked me the other day, 'Is amateur radio as popular as it once was?'. I didn't know quite how to answer, so hesitated with my reply. 'No' might have summed matters up succinctly and seemed to be the answer that was expected. Should I have said: 'Yes - there are more valid amateur radio licences in the UK than ever before - over 100,000, in fact'? As to the number of anything like active licencees, that figure is surely a lot less however. Those circa 100,000 licences are held by around 80,000 individuals and 1,500 radio clubs. The UK national Amateur Radio society (Radio Society of Great Britain, RSGB) has just over 20,000 members. The RSGB Technical group hosted on www/groups.io has only around 1,500 members. Given the above numbers, the ratio of active amatuers to valid licences has likely diminished massively over the past 40 years. What might once have been a ratio of 80%, could now be 20%, or less.

What happened?

Technology changed. The PC, Internet, www, hosted mega-corp social networks and powerful mobile phones happened, offering personal, licence- and barrier-free worldwide networking and communications for all. Technology is bought cheaply from afar, not made (in people's sheds) and it's 'cool' not to know how it works;
Society changed. Diversity and the changing worlds of work and leisure happened! Fewer people seem curious about / have interest in the Science, Technology and Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) that makes the world tick, although STEM study at UK universities is relatively healthy;
The UK regulator of communications (OFCOM) no longer collects an annual fee for each those 100,000 valid amateur radio licences, above. We can all dream of owning a business where customers might easily pay us one million plus GBP every year, but one in which we can't be bothered to get out of bed to cash their cheques! I think the idea was, when something is free, you are supposed to care a lot less (or not at all) about any related service(s) you might get. This idea has partly worked: OFCOM no longer cares about Amateur Radio, so long as safety of life services and revenue streams from their other clientelle are not impacted by it's presence.
Public perception of the value of the hobby is through the floor! Those that know of the 1961 (the year I was born, probably a coincidence) sketch performed by UK comedian, Tony Hancock, entitled, 'The Radio Ham', now regard it more as a documentary piece than a comedic one. Gone are the days when a person would admit being a radio amateur in a job interview, or to any subsequent work colleagues.

In an effort to reverse the obvious decline in the hobby, barriers to entry (breadth and depth of technical knowledge, operating skills, testing logistics, licence logistics and cost) have over the years been reduced and a (further) tiered licencing structure introduced. Profieciency in (even knowledge of) Morse code is no longer a requirement for any amateur licence type. Study for the UK entry-level amateur radio licence can be completed and the multiple-choice style exam (yes, passing an exam is still a requirement) sat in a single weekend, or less. To quote Thomas Paine: 'That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.' In the context of amateur radio, he could have been referring to the individual, to the standing of the hobby, to society. As a result of these reduced barriers, a greater proportion of amateurs than ever can afford to have little to zero interest in the technical underpinnings of the hobby. In 2026, it's not hard to imagine a UK in which future and further / complete deregulation could see part, or all, of amateur radio merged with other exam-free, licence-free, payment-free, radio classes, such as Citizens Band (CB) radio, 'PMR446', etc.

One crucial factor that continues to set amateur radio apart from technology platforms provided for us by others, however, is 'infrastructure'. It continues to be a unique characteristic that amateur radio needs no third-party provided infrustructure between sender and receiver. Dependency free (OK, except for electricity and some 'luminiferous aether' to support wave propagation), point-to-point, personal, world-wide communications. Many believe that amateur radio will play a significant role in emergency communications when the extinction event finally happens. This is yet to be tested!

Personally, I think the flavour, but not the specifics, of Amateur Radio that I have enjoyed has a future, so long as it is allowed to. Individuals (geeks, hackers, makers and those, like Dilbert, having the 'knack') with interest and curiosity in science, technology, electronics, computing and communications will continue to find the hobby and, over time, make it their own. Their 'own' will likely be quite different to that of others' who were at their most curious in the 1960s, 1980s, 2000s, etc. Hopefully these new champions will find breadth and depth in the hobby and it will prove rewarding and useful to them personally and maybe even benefit society in some small way. Hopefully there will be enough of these individuals that government will continue to grant them the rights and privileges they need to do their thing. They will deem any education, testing and financial obstacles put in their way to obtain licences to transmit worth overcoming.

Last modified: 20 August, 2026.