Hi my name is Jonathan Nethercott. I have been interested in electronics and programming for nearly 40 years. I have a degree in Electronic Systems Engineering, and have been a professional software engineer for nearly 30 years. In that time I’ve worked on all sorts of embedded systems and applications, including desktop apps, web sites, and mobile apps.

I first got involved in Amateur Radio back in the 1970s when I went to Guildford Radio Club. I didn’t actually join a radio club until 2013 when I joined Horsham Radio Club. I passed the Advanced level in 2014 and now hold a full licence with the callsign M0TWM.

My favourite bands are 80m (mainly for contests) and 20m (mainly for DX). I live in a block of flats, but have managed to put an 80m dipole up on the roof. Most of my kit is homebrew – so the antenna is made of 0.5mm enamelled wire, fishing line (at each end), 2m plastic waste pipe poles that I found in the garage, and it’s connected to my Yaesu FT-450 via about 40m of RG58 coax (I think – one day I’ll measure it by pinging a 100kHz square wave down it). I’ve used a choke balun at the feed point to the antenna, and rely on the built in ATU in the FT-450. It works very well, but the maximum power that I have ever used is 50W. Most of the time I try to use 10W.

At the Horsham club we have regular 2m Radio Fox Hunts, so creating some novel directional antennas is on my list of experiments that I will hopefully try in the coming months.