It must be Christmas

Well, not much going on here; just been playing Radio and generally taking things easy.

I made a visit to the post Christmas sales and came home with a laptop which is now interfaced to the FT857 via the homebrew device I was making earlier:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.com/2011/12/three-soundcards-no-you-must-be-kidding.html

That is enabling me to leave the laptop running WSPR whilst all the other electronics are shut down - except the FT857, of course.

Very neat laptop, got one of these new fangled Intel i5 processors and is running 64bit Windows 7 - all reasonably well priced and more importantly low power consumption.

I used to leave both PCs running in the shack, but more recently have taken to shutting them down - primarily to conserve power. But now I genuinely find that the shack is rather cold in a morning so I'm turning the heat on - not much of an energy saving!

The shack is looking quite tidy right now, I've even added yet more shelves to create more space in this tardis I spend my time inside:

I need to get outside and look at the Windom antenna again:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.com/2011/12/its-just-been-far-tooooo-long.html

because the SWR on the antenna is bouncing in windy conditions (again). I suspect it might just be too close to the other metal objects and when it moves around it's either touching the mast thats holding the 6m beam in the air or actually touching the antenna itself. Only time will tell.

The Geddy cat has many places he could chose to sleep; he has two proper cat beds, theres also four people beds in the house, plus a choice of sofas, chairs et cetera. He does, however, prefer to sleep on the clean washing as it waits for the ironing fairy to pop round:

Damn crazy cat!