Business and family illness issues have kept my head down for a couple of years. However, I've just had a spring-clean of the shack and been working the bands this month using the special call MQ0EZP to commemorate The Queen's Diamond Jubilee. 15m has had some good openings to the west; working Guadeloupe and the US with good reports.

The Mk2 Remote Aerial Selector Relay Unit installed in May 2011 after it's predecessor succumbed to water damage has weathered our wet winter with no apparent problems which was great!

My homebrew Sutton DSB HF multi-band transceiver (see right) has been dusted down and is working very well with 20w output on 160m.

The next construction project is likely to be the Minster SSB transceiver from Walford Electronics - Tim Walford is working on the Mk3 design. It will be a multiband, 5w SSB rig.

I have a neck RSI condition, hence my creating Computer Posture UK in 2010. I rely on a bluetooth headset for most of my phone calls and came across this article by K7SFN where a bluetooth headset was connected wirelessly to his transceiver so he could move around and rely on the transceiver's VOX control to switch transmit/receive. He used a Jabra A210 device which was developed as an adapter to provide bluetooth flexibility to non-bluetooth mobile phones.

K7SFN's article puts it very well and mine was a very straight forward project. The device has a 2.5mm stereo socket for mic in on the tip and phones out on the ring with sleeve to ground. As 2.5mm is a faff to solder, I used a 2.5mm-3.5mm adapter and then a 3.5mm to RCA Phone lead to give me two leads. I put a Yaesu mic connector on one lead and a ¼ inch jack plug on the other lead and amazingly it worked well first time as I tried to contact a station in Cyprus, another in Iceland and a nice audio report from a special event station in Portugal! That's fine using my FT-990 but my micro-shack has a FT-747 with no VOX so the next step was to build a VOX circuit!