Last Updated: May 2026
Life has been extremely busy since graduating last year, hence why I’ve been neglecting the website a bit. I spent a few months seemingly endlessly applying for jobs I wasn’t getting - a worryingly common trend for people my age according to recent news stories. I applied for a technician apprenticeship at a local theatre and got very close to getting the job, looking back after all I have learned over the last few months I can see now that I hadn’t quite found the right specialism for me, but I was definitely in the right ballpark with theatre tech. However, they could see how passionate I was about everything to do with lighting, sound and video, and pointed me in the direction of a free course at the local college.
I took this offer up and ended up meeting some great people, both my colleagues and people working at local theatres and venues. I met people with a wealth of experience in live events tech and picked up a few contacts through which I began shadowing engineers at a few local venues. I kept going with this for a bit but very quickly felt like I was learning very little - certainly with audio as I already had a good deal of mixing experience from recording and producing music as a hobby for the past five or six years, and had dabbled with DSP so had a good idea of how processing affects a signal at a sample level. I found it quite frustrating that I sometimes ended up showing the engineer I was meant to be shadowing how to sensibly set more advanced things like compressor attack/release times and reverb decay path attenuation filters rather than just leaving them at default for each channel.
However, just as I was beginning to feel I was in a bit of a dead end, I ended up getting in contact with a local AV rental company owner through a family friend, and asked if I could shadow a few shows. I was put on an outdoor event in the middle of February which was a tad chilly, but I learned more across those two days than I had learned in the entirety of the past few months and I immediately felt more at home. I was offered a few more shows and enjoyed them just as much, and I did a few days in the rental warehouse and enjoyed getting to see how that worked too.
And I am pleased to say that I am now regularly doing a few days a week in the warehouse and going out to shows when there’s anything big and exciting going on too! I’m working with fabulously experienced people who are up at the top of the industry, and I am learning best practice from the get-go; it feels like the opportunity of a lifetime. And, the size of the company I am working for means I get to see the whole process, from planning, prepping equipment, loading the truck, installing things, operating the show, striking everything down, testing and cleaning it and putting it all back away again, rather than just seeing one small part of that process. Suffice it to say I feel incredibly luck to have got this opportunity.
I’ve been doing a fair bit less radio operating recently with quite how exciting (read busy) life has been, but I’ve had a bit of time for some project work. I got myself a QMX+ for christmas after deciding I wanted to get on the HF bands, and after a swift look on Ebay, deciding I might not be able to afford to. The QMX+ is about £150 all out if you get a few accessories and factor in delivery, which is fabulously cheap for an all mode 160m-6m transciever with full CAT control and digital audio outputs, not to mention countless other features. The catch is it comes as a kit, and you’ve got to build it yourself (well, strictly speaking you don’t have to but it’s cheaper if you do, and there’s a pretty significant waiting list for built kits too).
I was a little apprehensive about my first big soldering project costing me £150, given how easily I might well mess it up beyond repair. I think that actually worked in my favour though as I was always in a heightened state of concentration when working on building the radio, checking the instructions quite literally hundreds of times before even turning the iron on. There were some much harder bits and some very easy bits, and I have improved my soldering technique no end. I can now consistently solder good joints and have picked up a bit of speed too.
The QMX+ works fabulously, I have been making FT8 contacts all across Europe and into the US as well - and all of this with a dipole which consists of some RG58, an ice cream tub for a choke balun, a bit of cardboard to form the T section and two lengths of bell wire to act as radiators. I am incredibly impressed with what less than £200 worth of equipment can do, it’s incredible that I can quite easily contact the entire world like this. Now just to learn morse properly… (< that’s an “S” by the way!)
Meshcore continues to grow in the UK, and I am fully enjoying the fruits of that at the moment. I’m running a “proper” repeater now (ie, I’ve finally upgraded the stock Heltec antenna). I’m running a repeater node with a (supposedly) 5.8dBi collinear attached to it, run through a very short IPEX pigtail which I felt was more appropriate for the +22dBm output of the board at 869.618MHz than the provided 10m run of very cheap feeling RG58 (I suspect even the stock antenna might have outperformed that setup!). The client node remains a standard config V3, but that doesn’t matter as it’s rarely out mobile anyway.
I’ve been educating myself a lot more recently on late Saxon to late C14 ecclesiastical architecture and history. I am currently in the middle of reading volumes I, III and IV of Guilielmus Durandus’ Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, a series from around 1290 covering the scholarly interpretation of the symbolism contained within Catholic architecture of Christendom. The Mystical Mirror of the Church, a publication of Saxon Canon regular Hugo de Sancto Victore is included in part in the same book and there are some notable similarities between this and Durandus’ later text. I am yet to read Bede’s E.H., though look forward to it. I am also finding very interesting the Rev. J. Charles Cox’s series The antiquary’s books which cover many topics of ecclesiastical history in fine detail and are fabulously referenced. Above all, however, Francis Bond’s many excellent books on ecclesiastical craftsmanship, engineering and ritual practice continue to serve as a fabulous and rigorous introduction to the many topics covered.
I am getting slowly better at reading Latin and am now able to translate most sentences and inscriptions written in Ecclesiastical Latin particularly. I have the Cambridge Latin Course books ready to work through when I find the motivation.
Well, “neglected” doesn’t even really do it justice, does it. Apologies for the relative radio silence for the past few months, I hope now you can perhaps find it within you, dear reader, to forgive me. I’ll try and write a little more this year - well, it’s hardly as if I could write any less now, is it!
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