A Personal Logbook
Amateur radio, astronomy, a little archaeology, the technology threaded through all of it, the occasional rabbit hole, and whatever else has my attention. If any of it is useful to someone else, all the better.
What drives me
Whatever the subject, the same three habits run through it. They are my plain-English version of the old definition of amateur radio, and they still describe how I like to work.
Learning
Picking things up because they’re interesting, and following a question as far as it will go.
Tinkering
Building small tools and experiments that earn their keep, to answer real questions.
Communication
Writing it up and sharing the methods openly, in case any of it is useful to someone else.
Writing
Retired
19 Aug 2026
After many years of working life, I retired at the end of July 2026.
Two quieter rooms
21 Jun 2026
Why I left the big social platforms, where I landed, and how Mastodon and Bluesky feel a year on.
A new home for the logbook
18 Jun 2026
Why I'm relaunching the old blog as a quiet, static logbook, and what that means.
Investigations
UK Grid
9 Aug 2026
A single page showing what is generating Britain's electricity right now, how clean it is and where the power is out, built around one rule: say what each number actually is.
Teletext: a new old-fashioned way to read the news
24 Jun 2026
A faithful recreation of 1970s teletext, the blocky colour-text TV service, but with the pages written fresh three times a day by an AI working from live UK news, finance, sport and weather.
HF propagation dashboard
5 Jun 2026
A worldwide dashboard that shows, band by band, what the physics predicts and what stations on the air are actually proving, side by side and never merged.