Settled In Our New Home At Last!

On Monday 10th February, we were handed the keys to our new property. It was all very short notice, but that's what we expected anyway. Luckily, we had already prepared as much as we could by getting a lot of the packing done in advance. We were then given an official period of two weeks to vacate the old place - plenty of time! This is day ten of fourteen and we are almost done. All that remains is a spot of last-minute tidying at the old place, making sure it's left in a clean condition and then a couple of journeys to the skips and that's the lot!

We took it upon ourselves to do the removals ourselves, excluding the larger and heavier items of course which we trusted to a local "Man With A Van", who did a great job. This saved us a small fortune, although it meant taking about 25 car journeys to transfer the rest of our belongings. The new place is still in town and, as luck would have it, even in the same locator square, so I don't feel the need to create new logbooks from scratch.

Before moving to the new address, we made a few visits to check everything out, not least listening for any amounts of electrical noise which might be a nuisance to our radio listening. I know this is not the best reason for choosing or declining a property, but it's one of the things we considered.

The new place has two rooms less, but they are actually slightly larger. Hmm - that means the carpets won't fit. Damn! Thanks to a little bit of improvisation though we managed to work a way around this. We had a few roll ends and offcuts we'd saved from the last place after the carpet people had fitted them. I am pretty good at fitting carpets so that side of things is nicely taken care of.

To recap. The main reason for our move was the shocking rent increase and bedroom tax, so we have Mr Cameron and Co. to thank. We were getting into a mess with things and they were only going to get worse, so it was a decision we had made a few months ago. We had looked around a few places and had even considered another swap, but we left the old housing association and decided to risk it with a new landlord to increase the possibilities. Another factor which had encouraged us to move was the terrible problems we had endured from our old neighbours for three years.

The new place is a detached bungalow, which means we don't have any neighbours! :O) It seemed to be the right thing to do. It was more affordable too, being slightly smaller. There are gardens all around the new property and, thanks to some clever planning, none of the nearest neighbours' windows look into our property, so we are quite well out of the way.

But what about radio? It's less than a mile from the beach and this shows beautifully across band 2. Continental signals are stronger and, one of the most important things for me, there is no noise across the band either. It's the same for medium wave too! I can hear really weak signals on band 2, lifting out of the noise with the greatest of ease and I have only been using a Triax FM5 one metre above the ground during a few random listening tests. The more 'regular' continentals have all been noise free. In fact it's so quiet, it's been like listening on one of my remote radio camping trips. German transmitters at Aurich, Lingen, Osnabruck, Steinkimmen, Langenburg, Kleve, Aachen, Bonn, Munster and Bremen have all been providing noise-free signals on peak. The big question is, how long will it last? Well, as has often been said, nothing is guaranteed. Noise can appear at any time. We're all living with that ticking time bomb regarding noise these days. I am just keeping my fingers crossed it will last.

Finally, I raised the FM5 to rooftop height this afternoon. The elements are still entangled in the conifers so I need to cut some of this away. Since raising this I found can hear Brocken again! This has been absent for almost two years at the old place due to the noise. How nice to be hearing it again, albeit down in the mush, but it's clear enough. I also think I heard DLR Kultur from Inselberg on 97.2 a few minutes ago. There are other very weak signals I can only guess about so, noise permitting, the new QTH looks like being a lot of radio fun. Fingers crossed it lasts!