My Ham radio stuff as of March 2022

Welcome to my shack, I know this is the first post and maybe it should be a bombastic “look at this awesome stuff”, “unboxing of an IC whatever”, but well it is not…

I have been interested in ham radio since forever, well that should be 1995 or so, when I was still a volunteer at the German THW (Technisches Hilfswerk), but it took 25 more years for me to get a license. Now I have a novice license in the Netherlands and my call sign is PD8JO.

Learning for the novice license took me maybe longer than it should, but I also took the harder route I suppose. I started learning in German (my native tongue) to understand at least something, after that I switched to Dutch learning books and went on doing the prep exams. I gave myself a hard stop by scheduling the exam way in advance, so I had 7 months to prep myself, of course, most of the learning was towards the end of that time line.

Since then, I am working on getting my shack into shape, on the radio site:

• The first radio I bought was the (infamous) Baofeng UV-5R. I actually bought it during learning for my novice license, it was quite nice to listen to the different coffee rounds the PI3ASD is hosting very morning, while doing some prep work.
• The radio was followed by an “Anytone D878UV Plus” together with a pi-star (raspberry zero + MMDVM board).
• MMDVM — with Raspberry Zero (single Antenna)
• MMDVM Jumbo Spot — with Raspberry 3+ (dual Antenna)