The McKenzie’s Blog…

I’ve been working on this project for a few weeks (lack of time).  Basically, I bought a huge 120A/hr battery to go camping with and to use for other things, such as portable amateur radio work.

Well, that’s all well and good, but how do I connect things to it?  I wanted some easy way to connect multiple things to the battery without having to have a number of wires getting attached to the battery.

So, not wanting to spend ARM+LEG and either our first or second born to buy something already made, and it wouldn’t include the cig plugs either.

So, I made this:

Read on if you’d like to see the other pics .. or, you can just go and look at them in my Flickr Gallery

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I’m going to try and keep a log of my various walks and travels, as recorded by the GPS in my phone.

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I’ve just posted some of the pictures from Mull.  You can find them in the Gallery.  There are just over 300 pics of the 1000 or so that I took while away.

I will post some videos once I’ve had a chance to go through them and convert them for the web .. it could be a week or so as this weekend will be super busy.

I have 2 RAYNET events.  Saturday is the Cottenham Fun Run, and Sunday is the Oxfam: Cambridge Walk.  More on that if there is anything to report.

Enjoy the pics.. I’ll try to upload more later, plus the videos.

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Well the trip to Scotland was great!!!  I’ve taken around about 1000 pics and videos, I’ll go through them and get a selection of them put up in the gallery. 

This is the write up of my trip.  It’s very long and contains lots of links..   The pics of the trip will follow ..  Click to see the full story.

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Well we are finally here in Scotland.. but not quite in Mull yet.  We departed Gav’s (M1BXF) house today about 1030 am.. a short stop at Huntingdon for some breakfast then it was anchors away and northward bound.  We had a very uneventful trip north.  Saw a couple of accidents on the way but nothing that effected us.

We arrived in Helensburgh at Gav’s folks house for the night.. we arrived about 1915hrs.  All in all not a bad trek considering all the kit we had in the Jeep and on the trailer.  I’ll provide pics of that later and post a link as well.

We had a great dinner “ruby murry” (Curry, it’s cockney rhyming slang haha) .. then a quick trip to the pub for a couple of drinks and finally back to the house.

We’ll set out Saturday morning about 10am for Oban where we are booked for a 1400hrs sailing of the ferry to Mull.  I should be able to post to more later if we have Internet.. if we at least have telephone and I get SMS messages out to Twitter and you can follow our adventures on my twitter page .. http://twitter.com/m1xzg, or check out things out on the CAMB-HAMS page.

Hope to get more post later on..

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Some might have noticed a sub-page I started off my Ham Radio page.. there are a group of us going from Cambridge to the Isle of Mull on the West coast of Scotland at the end of April for week.  This is a DX-pedition to Mull to active some rare squares, WAB, IOTA and SOTA locations.  While we are away one of our guys will be staying behind with his expecting wife and will help co-ordinate things for us back home and update the CAMB-HAMs website.

I won’t update the page I have on here with info about about the trip while we’re away, the best place will be the Camb-Hams Website

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Last night was the AGM of the local Cambridge RAYNET group.  It’s a small group that is really only active on a handful of annual events around the Cambridge area.  RAYNET is the UK’s Radio Amateur’s Emergency Network.  This is a group of volunteers from around the UK that are all licensed radio amateurs from all walks of life that are prepared to give up their time when disasters or emergencies arise across the country.

The AGM, is much like others in any organization.. read the minutes, hear from the various committee members and treasurer etc, including the elections.  They needed to fill the position of Training Officer for the group.  I agreed to do this for the coming year.  I’ve no real idea what can or will be done in this role, but we’ll see.  If nothing else I hope it will provide some valuable links to the Disaster Planning and Emergency Comms related folks both at a national level as well as the local level.

I’ll keep some postings on this as I go along with this role.

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