Today, as the weather forecast was good, I took a trip to the WWT reserve at Slimbridge.

The weather was cold with sunshine and broken cloud with a cold wind.

I managed to get some good images of the captive birds, and enjoyed going to the hides to watch the massive flocks of waders.  There were very large flocks of Lapwing and Golden Plover, but the star sightings were definitely some Spotted Redshanks and Ruff, but to cap it all off, we had a great sighting of a male Sparrowhawk from the Holden Tower.

I was hoping to get some good photographs of Starling flocks coming home to roost, but they are apparently not roosting at the reserve this year.

The sight of the Bewicks swans coming in to the reserve when the feeding starts is always impressive.

Overall I’ve been impressed with the Bug, and although I’d got full strength on the Digital1 stations, the BBC stations were a bit hit and miss, and as I’m a keen listener of Radio 1, 2 & 4, I was a bit disappointed.

I got some improvement by moving my DECT phone base station to the other side of the room, then as I have a Freeview PVR, I thought I’s plu into the rooftop Aerial and see what happened.

Wow, what a difference this made.  Now I have 98% signal strength for all of the BBC channels, and my channel count increased from 18 to 50!!!  I can now get many stations from London (some 50 miles away).

A quick trip to Maplins got me a couple of satellite cables with F connectors, a F splitter and a  couple of fittings to convert the F type cable into a conventional coax plug.

This cost about £20 in all, but its worth it, and I don’t have to worry about the BBC channels dropping out now.

Result.

My clock radio has been on the blink for a while now, so tonight I wandered into John Lewis to have a look at the DAB clock radios.

On the clearance shelf I found a Pure Bug Too.  I’ve wanted one of these since they first came out, but they’re now about half the price the were when launched, and as the one I got was a return with all manuals and cables, but no box, there was £20 off, so I got it here and then.

When I first set it up, I couldn’t get any of the national BBC stations, but after playing with the aerial length and moving the DECT phone base station, I could get everything from the BBC.

The unit, has a quirky appearance, reminding me of the Martians in the 1953 version of War of the Worlds, the radio even has eyes.

The LCD screen in large, and easily visible, it has the facility for multiple alarms and you can select what radio station you wake up to.  It has an SD card slot so that you can record programs and listen to them later, and it also supports the DAB EPG, so that you can view the schedules for the next 7 days.

You can also pause and rewind live radio for up to 4 minutes so you don’t miss anything when the phone rings.   The Bug Too has most of the features of the Pure Evoke 3, but at less than half the price.

I’ve read reviews complaining that the LCD backlight is too bright to use this unit as a clock radio, but I do not have an issue with the lowest brightness setting, and it does not light up the room like the reviews suggest.

One of my New Years resolutions this year was to watch less TV, listen to more radio and read more, and this is certainly helping me to do that.

If you can live with the quirky looks, then get one of these units, they’re fantastic.

I’ve been playing with the Garmin 660T that I got for Christmas, and have been very impressed.

Initially, I was annoyed to find that the unit didn’t have the integral FM transmitter, but £6 later and a trip to Amazon gets me a FM transmitter that plugs into the headphone socket and works a treat.

The FM Traffic signal is a bit dodgy, and doesn’t work very well, as a recent trip to Reading showed, but thats why I have the Trafficmaster unit as backup.  I got a signal for part of the way, but not for the most part.

I’ve tried uploading the SMC Contours (http://www.smc.org.uk/ContourMaps.htm), but these don’t seem to work on this unit, though they work well on Dad’s Nuvi 350 unit.

However, I have been playing with making Garmin TourGuide files.  I found a great guide on the Zumo Forums (http://www.zumoforums.com/index.php?topic=1566.0), but have found that the whole process is made much simpler by using a piece of software called GeePeeEx Editor, which only costs about £8 to register (http://geepeeex.googlepages.com/downloadlinks).

This has proved to be fun, and I have already created Tourguide files for the WWT Reserves, and also for BBOWT reserves, and I hope to do some more soon, and get them listed to my website, now that I have moved to my own hosting account.

Well, given that I’m currently dealing with all the Sh!t that goes with a Divorce, I have to say that this Christmas has been the best Christmas that I’ve had in a while.

I’ve had almost 2 weeks off, and have got to spend a decent amount of time with the family, rather than the paltry couple of days that I’ve managed to spend at home over Xmas in recent years, due to Alice not wanting to spend too much time at home.

I’ve spent loads of time catching up with friends that I haven’t seen for years, and have had a great time.

Anyway, heres to a fresh start and a great 2008.