Welcome to GeekHouse
About Me...
Hi! My name is Gavin, welcome to my webpage. I hope to use this space to chronicle my adventures in amateur radio and electronics. I'll most likely add a few pages about other hobbies and interest as and when I have time.
In August 2009 I moved to Trumpington on the outskirts of Cambridge but for the past 4 years before that I've lived in a fairly large village called Melbourn, situated about 12 miles south west of Cambridge, England. I'm 29 years old and originally from Scotland, Helensburgh to be exact which is west of Glasgow. I spent 2 years living in the Czech Rep. before moving to Melbourn. I have a variety of interests such as fishing, mixing music, gardening, beer drinking etc but may main hobbies are amateur radio and electronics.
My amateur radio callsign in use nowadays is M1BXF but was originally licensed as MM1BXF and have also been active as OK8BXF. My main interest lies in VHF/UHF weak signal digi modes, I'm a big fan of WSJT. I usually monitor 50.230 JT6m (tropo) and 144.370 FSK441 (meteor scatter) when in the shack. If there is a lift on I'll be in the SSB segments of 6m, 2m or 70cm and if the moon is up then I'm likely to be lurking around the EME segment of 2m and on the JT65 EME chat page. I can also be found using the ON4KST chat page if you want a sked.
I'm currently serving as the technical co-ordinator for the Cambridgeshire Repeater Group (CRG) which operate 9 amateur radio repeaters in the Cambridgeshire area with plans to develop and increase our capabilities - take a look at what we are upto here http://www.cambridgerepeaters.net. Currently I'm heavily focused on the new digital mode D-Star having got the D-Star repeater GB7PI on air in late 2007. I have written three D-Star related articles inthe Uk national ham radio magazine RadCom and have done more than 16 D-Star presentations both locally and nationally.
Alongside the CRG I'm an active member of the Camb-Hams who are a bunch of enthusiastic hams around Cambridge who do things instead of talk about it. So far since 2007 we have been to Friedrichshafen 3 times (in 2007, 2008 & 2009), in 2008 we went to the Island of Mull and manned IOTA, SOTA, HF and VHF stations, in September 2008 a few of us went to a radio rally in Belgium activating a SOTA summit on the way. Previously we have entered VHF NFD in 2006 and we done it again in 2009 after our 2009 dx'pedition to the Island of Harris where again we operated IOTA, SOTA, HF and VHF stations. We also meet once a month for beer and off-air discussions. See the webpage for more info.
I work as a Project Manager for a company called IOTAS near Cambridge. IOTAS provide testing solutions to a wide array of companies and this takes me all over the place. Previous positions I've held are a Field Applications Engineer for Aeroflex involving supporting customers of their TM500 LTE test mobile in various respects and again involved loads of travel. Before that I worked as a senior cellular approvals engineer for CSR, one of the worlds largest fabless bluechip companies on blutooth, GPS, UWB, NFC and WiFi but my role is in cellular software test covering technologies from GSM to LTE including HSDPA, HSUPA and HSPA+. I used to spend lots of time traveling to standards meetings and trying to keep up to date with operators and handset companies requirements.