RadioStuff

06/09/2026

🌍 New free tool from radio-stuff.com: Ham Map!

A live day/night greyline map with your own grid square marked on it, plus current solar flux, sunspot number, A-index and K-index at a glance — with a plain-English HF band outlook so you know where to point the beam.

Bonus: a historical propagation chart you can scrub all the way back to 1948.

No sign-up, no install, works great on your phone.

👉 Try it now: https://chrissuddell.github.io/ham-map/

Want to run it on your own club site? It's free and open source:
🛠️ https://github.com/chrissuddell/ham-map

73!

16/07/2026

Rotator Master — a self-hosted antenna rotator controller on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W

I've been building an antenna rotator controller that runs entirely on a single Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W — no PC, no phone app, no cloud. The Pico serves its own web page, so you just point a browser at it and drive the antenna from the dial.

At home it joins my WiFi; out in the field it becomes its own access point, so I connect my phone straight to it. I can send it a compass heading, or type in a Maidenhead grid square and it works out the great-circle bearing and distance and swings the beam onto it. There's cable-wrap protection built in too — it always takes the shortest legal path and never over-winds the feedline past north.

Under the hood it's MicroPython driving a geared stepper through a DRV8833, with a proper acceleration ramp so the motor doesn't stall, plus a small REST API so it can hook into logging software. Chuffed with how it's turned out.

73 de M0VUE — more projects at www.radio-stuff.com

08/05/2026

Hello everyone,

I'm off for a walk on the 20th of June 2026 in aid of Cancer Research. It's a full marathon distance. It would be nice if you could find the time to donate any money you can, I'm trying to raise £300.

I will be taking a 2m hand held along the way, just in case I can make some QSO's.

Thanks for taking the time to visit my Giving Page. This year I am taking part in Big Hike to help power progress for people affected by cancer. Please donate to my Giving Page and help me take big steps to beat cancer.

29/04/2026

We have just completed a new design on our EFHW and EFRW cases, these will not be offered in SO239 as we as BNC. Also both will have a counterpoise wing nut.