About GazLabs

Ham radio · Electronics · RC · Home lab · Gaming

GazLabs is a personal hobby website run by a licensed UK radio amateur and RSGB member. It started as a place to keep notes on radios, cables and fixes that were hard to find elsewhere, and has grown into a mix of hands-on articles, free web tools and reference guides for people who enjoy tinkering.

Everything here is written and built by one person, in spare time, from a home shack in the UK. There is no company, no team of writers and no sponsored content.

What you'll find here

• Amateur radio articles — hands-on looks at new transceivers and handhelds, comparisons, interface and cable guides (for example linear amplifier PTT and band-data leads), driver and firmware fixes, and digital modes such as FT8, D-STAR and System Fusion.
• Free ham radio tools — live solar and space-weather data, HF band conditions, DX cluster spots, amateur satellite passes, a grey-line world map, antenna and PPM calculators and an interactive FT8 setup hub. All focused on UK and IARU Region 1 operators.
• Equipment support — fault-finding helpers for Ciro loop antennas, a wide-band modification database, and support notes for ACOM amplifiers.
• Mesh networking and SDR — Meshtastic trackers and a live mesh map, software-defined radio set-up and home-built receiver projects.
• RC cars — buying guides and advice for bashing in the UK.
• Home lab and Linux — Raspberry Pi builds, self-hosted services, privacy-first networking and security tools.
• Game guides — in-depth guides for Soulmask, an Enshrouded recipe book and an ARK: Survival Ascended breeding calculator, written while running community game servers.

How the content is made

Articles are based on real use: radios that have been on the desk, cables that have been built and tested, and problems that have actually been fixed. Where a review is based on early or pre-production hardware, or on manufacturer specifications rather than testing, the article says so. Prices and specifications are checked at the time of writing and dated, and posts are updated when things change.

GazLabs is not paid by manufacturers or dealers for coverage. If that ever changes for a particular article, it will be clearly disclosed on that page.

Where the live data comes from

The live tools use public, openly available data: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center for solar data, Celestrak for satellite orbital elements, dxc.jo30.de for DX cluster spots and OpenSky Network for aircraft positions. Where possible these are fetched and cached on the server, so your browser isn't contacting lots of third parties.

How GazLabs is funded

All tools and articles are free to use with no signup. Hosting is paid for out of pocket, helped by adverts served through Google AdSense. See the Privacy Policy for how advertising cookies work and how to opt out.

Get in touch

Spotted a mistake, found a bug in one of the tools, or got a radio question? Use the contact form — every message is read.

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