Hi Matt,
Thanks for setting up the forum, fingers crossed people join in and it becomes a busy place.
My names Andy and I am from Fleetwood, Lancashire. I am almost 50 and I work as a Marine surveyor have spent most of my working life prior to this at sea as a ships officer. I have probably spent most of my working life talking into radios either hand held or fixed VHF, MF and Airband too.
But Ham radio is some thing new to me but I have always kinda had an interest in radio as I have owned several scanners mostly for monitoring airband when I spent a lot of my free time taking photos of fighter jets flying low level.
Since coming ashore, I seem to have a lot less free time and some weeks I have next to no free time so my hobbies get put on the back burner.
I only recently passed my foundation exam and I am in the process of setting up a shack in my man cave at home. I have an Icom 7300 and plan to use an EFHW or vertical antenna for that. I have a few handheld radios too from the Baofeng uv21pro, Retevis RT3s, a couple of Quanshengs ( I think half the world now own these lil radios?) and Santa recently delivered an Icom52e too
ah well thats enough brew time waffle from me, I am hoping to get to TCARS at some point in the future when work allows but I am on early starts and late finishes with work at the moment so might be a few weeks before I can surface at a meeting.
73's
Andy