G4FPH Amateur Radio Pages
Hello 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. Use your browser's 'Forward' and 'Back' buttons to navigate around.
Send an e-mail to g4fph@mjha.co.uk to arrange a sked or what have you?
*** This website is very much a work-in-progress (aka a bit of a mess) and I shall be adding and editing content as and when time and enthusiasm permit. Some pages have been carried forward from my previous website as-is and are yet to be re-formatted / re-edited. ***
The intro...
2026 sees the 50th anniversary of my holding a Class A Amateur Transmitting Licence, with it's one and only accompanying callsign, 'G4FPH'.
Amateur radio is today often described as a hobby, pastime and leisure interest. It is and has always been all of these things, of course, otherwise it would be 'professional' radio, of some sort! 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 a interesting career and a good start to retirement!
Most recent contacts form 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.
- The HF aerial switching unit is a 5-way commercial unit by Ameritron (tye RCS-8V). It allows remote (from the shack) connection of any of the three aerials above onto the common coaxial feeder back to the shack. The long, main feeder run between the aerial field and the shack is Andrew LDF4-50A heliax.
- VHF/UHF: A number of FM-only transceivers are available for the two metre and seventy centimetre amateur bands, but they are are not permanently connected to the aerial. Instead, the aerial (a two-element, dual-band co-linear mounted on the chimney of the house) is left connected to Internet accessible Receiver 3 (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, so will hear next to nothing outside of these bands.
- Receiver 1: This receiver runs WebSDR software by Pieter-Tjerk de Boer, PA3FWM. 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 switches between 60 and 40 metre bands across the day and week. Again, I've tried to set the switching times such as to make the receiver of most use to groups and indivisuals that use these bands regularly.
- Receiver 3: This receiver runs OpenWebRX+ software by Marat Fayzullin. Listeners (to a maximum of four simultaneous) can select the frequency band to 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 to it also.
- Receiver 4: I am also sysop for a fourth internet accessible receiver, located near Derby. 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 - 60/40 metres |
Stafford - VHF/UHF+ |
Derby - 160 metre only |
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| Receiver 1: 160 / 80 |
Receiver 2: 60/40 |
Receiver 3: VHF/UHF+ |
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, exept that holidays were not mandatory and often both parties to a particular communication over the airwaves would send a card to the other. The 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 electronics equivalents thesedays, so, sadly, the 'wall-art' aspect is largely gone.
| UK |
Europe |
North America |
South America |
USSR |
Other and SWL |
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| UK |
Europe |
North America |
South America |
USSR |
Other and SWL |
Early days (work in progress)
| The pre-transmitting (mostly) / pre-licensed years |
The Birmingham radio scene |
Studying for 'the ticket' |
November 1976 |
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| Getting the bug |
Locals and friends |
Helping hands |
The day arrives |
Reelin' In The Years: Tales, pictures and noteable happings during my amateur radio years (work in progress)
| 1976 - 1979 |
1980 - 1989 |
1990 - 1999 |
2000 - 2009 |
2010 - 2019 |
2020 - current |
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| Early days |
The eighties |
The nineties |
The naughties |
No turning back |
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 |
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| Old transmitter |
Old amplifier |
Radio man-cave! |
Tools of the trade |
Keeping warm |
Connecting to the aether |
Projects |
An antedote to awards |
Useless and 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 100,000 licences are held by around 80,000 individuals and 1,500 radio clubs. The UK national amateur radio society (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?
- The Internet / www / hosted social networks / PC and mobile phones happened. Personal, licence- and barrier-free communications and personal networking for all;
- Society changed, diversity became obvious, fewer people are curious about / have any interest in the science, technology and engineering that makes the world tick;
- Technology is bought, not made (in people's sheds);
- In our largely services-based economy, people make fewer things and relax easily into the habit of so-doing!
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 cost) have over the years been reduced and a tiered licencing structure introduced. Study for the UK entry-level licence can be completed and the multiple-choice style exam (yes, passing an exam is still a requirement!) passed 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, more amateurs than ever before have little to zero interest in the technical underpinnings of the hobby.
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 the ionosphere), point-to-point, personal, world-wide communications.
I assert that Amateur Radio has a future, so long as it is allowed to. Individuals (geeks, hackers, makers and those, like Dilbert, having the 'knack') interested in electronics, computing, science, technology, communications will continue to find the hobby and, over time, make it their own. That 'own' will be quite different to that of the 1950s, 1980s, 2000s, etc. Hopefully they will find depth in the hobby and it will prove rewarding and useful to them personally and benefit society in some way. Hopefully there will be enough of them that government will continue to grant them the rights and privileges they need to do their thing. They will deem the education and testing obstacles put in their way to obtain licences to transmit worth overcoming.
Copyright 2026 Mark Hill, G4FPH.
Last modified: 10 August, 2026.