I had a ride out to Ranmore Common today, it was a sunny day to I took the chance. Quite a bit of traffic on the road, even for a Sunday morning!




Found the car park ok. You can see from the photo that its quite big which means it must get quite busy. I dod'nt notice any toilets and for £2 a day there should be something!

From the other photo you can see the hill side. Makes for a good location for /p maybe with an 817 or something. Handy as its not far from the car.





Its a bit of a shame that the parking is not free, so I carried on a little further.





A bit further on down the lane I came across another car park, no fancy view but this one was free! Of course I took a picture and its below. The ASL is slightly higher but I need to check the Terrain with some software and Google Earth. I'm sure I'll end up in this car park sometime this year.

Handsfree fitted!

At last, got my old Heatherlite neck mic back in the car, real pukka job
and seems to work 100%. I used a heavy Belkin STP (shielded) snagless
cable and ran this to my control box on the mic. I used two ferrite
rings at each end, this makes a total of almost 10 rings in total as I
use them on the remote head and voltage meter!! The cabling is becoming
quite a mess so when the weather warms up I might left the cover and
tidy the system up.

I have found the battery (year old) is struggling with the cold a bit, I
am looking into a better battery charger, maybe a top of the range Ring
Smart Charger but at around £50 not cheap. I was getting 12.01 on 100w
10M and 11.60 on 6M 100W using FM with air temp of about 8C. I have
topped the battery up a little and its fully charged.

I have decided to aim for an IC-7000 this year and run that with a dual
band linear if I can find one with enough poke, otherwise I'll ditch the
amp. It works fine but the 7000 puts out 50w with is not that much less
in real terms. The amp in the car takes up quite a bit of space also.