Honey Monster Choco Puffs Review

Vendor: Poundland
Price: £1
Description: Chocolate coated Honey puffed rice

What the hell happened to Sugar Puffs? I bought this enticing little number from my friendly neighbourhood Poundland recently.
Quality was to be expected with such a destinguised brand as Quaker. And this seemed a bargain for only one £1..... Wrong!

Walkie-Talkie Long Range Test

Binatone Action 1100 from the top of Winter hill

This post is a follow on from last weeks review and short range testing of the Binatone 1100's. Not content with the 3-4Km range already achieved, I felt it was now time to push these Walkie-Talkies to their limits. Would they reach the 10Km mark?
Roughly twenty minutes drive from home is Winter Hill which sits among the West Pennine moors and overlooks the town of Horwich near Bolton, Lancashire.
Winter Hill is roughly 456m or 1496Ft ASL (above sea level)
This makes for an ideal high point to test UHF radios which generally have limited range and rely on line-of-sight.
For this test a position quite near to the transmitter mast was chosen. This spot can be reached via Georges lane and Matchmoor lane.
Read more....

M60 Motorway Misery

Motorway Misery 

Tales of despair from the orbital orifice

Update #1: Nothing smart about this Motorway

Introduction: 

For those who don't have a clue what I'm talking about then let me explain. 

The M60 Motorway orbits the city of Manchester in north west England. It is the only Motorway ring road in the UK. The Motorway is a little over 30 miles in it entirety and forms a complete ring around Manchester serving the smaller suburban towns on the periphery. Unfortunately It has been a bottleneck for traffic madness for years with certain sections and junctions becoming a static jam in the daily rush hour. To try and combat this Highways England together with MSM (Manchester Smart Motorways) started work on a 'Smart' controlled section running for 17 miles through the worst of the problems. The roadworks begin at M60 J8 and extends onward to M62 J20 with traffic currently restricted to 50mph.  The project originally started back in 2014 with the expected completion date sometime in autumn 2017. 

For more information:  Smart Upgrade M60/M62

PMR Walkie-Talkie Modification

Make the most of your Walkie-Talkies 

❗❗ Caution ❗❗ Please be sure you know what you are doing before attempting any adjustments. You do so at your own risk. 

Question? Do you have trouble hearing other Walkie-Talkies when moving further apart?

Solution: Your Handset noise reduction circuitry could be activating too early causing drop outs and loss of contact. This minor tweak may improve your ability to receive distant stations without opening the noisy monitor function full time.
No soldering required.

Requirements:
2 X Philips head screwdrivers or bits. 1 X small, 1 X large . knowledge of where the relevant components are.

Theory:
Squelch essentially cuts out most of the background noise you would normally hear when using FM radio. However, occasionally when two sets get further away the voice transmission may become broken or even lost. To overcome this most Handsets have a open Squelch button which deactivates and allows all the background noise to be heard which is annoying to the ear after a short time. The ideal situation is to have the noise reduction stay on a tad longer if possible. The squelch level on all PMR Walkie-Talkies are predetermined in the factory and are non-adjustable by the user. That is unless you can identify the correct component and make some small adjustments yourself.
Usually most consumer PMR446's will have a screw adjusted post for both Squelch and voice modulation somewhere on the main board. The pic below shows the inside of a Silvercrest handset.

Mame4droid Retro Round up #1

 Mame4Droid Retro Round up 

Mame4droid allows Android devices to emulate the old original arcade games.

*To play these games download mame4droid from the playstore! 

Round up #1 - Stuck in the 1940's

Welcome to the first Retro Round up. Old arcade games are something of a fascination of mine since being a small child.

Many of my fondest memories come from hours spent in some arcade or another. Arcade games offered better graphics and an overall better experience than my humble Atari or commodore C64 could muster. Everyone wanted an arcade copy of Space Harrier not a Sinclair spectrum port! 

Nowerdays we can emulate the original MAME ROM sets on our handheld devices. Enter Mame4droid and a few hundred roms and the arcade is in your hands. 

This section features quick fire game ROM reviews. Nothing fancy. Just straight to the point!

Expand to read more...

Maplin Infrared Thermometer Review

Vendor: Maplin

Price: £19.99 - currently £39.99

Manufacturer: for Maplin

Description: Compact thermometer featuring wide temperature range -35 to +365°C. 

What's in the Box?: Thermometer, Batteries and instructions.

Features:

Temp Range: -35 to +365°C 

Distance to spot ratio (D:S) : 8:1

Basic Accuracy: +/- 2.5% of reading or 2.5°C

Power: 2 X AAA 

Silvercrest Twin Talker 4810 PMR Review

Vendor: Lidl
Price: £19.99
Manufacturer: TopCom
Description: PMR 446 2 Way Radios twin set
What's in the box?: 2 X Handsets, 2 X Ear phone/mic, 1 X dual charger dock, 1 X UK plug, 8 X 600mAh AAA rechargeable batteries, 1 X Instructions.

It's not very often I find myself in Lidl supermarkets. On a rare occasion once I found these hiding in the bargain bins.
At the time I did have Walkie-Talkies on my wish list and these looked very exciting. When it comes to buying good quality Walkie-Talkies £19.99 doesn't normally get you very far. Indeed you can buy a cheap £20 set but these are often Handsets only and no features. For a good set with batteries, charger and headset mic you need to spend at least double that. Enter Silvercrest!
Let's get one thing clear before I start this review. These are NOT toys! The price is no reflection of quality.

What are PMR 446 Walkie-Talkies?

What's 446?

Have you come across PMR radios and wondered what they are or how they worked? ..No?
Well if next year's summer holiday involves a skiing trip or similar outdoor adventure you may find yourself purchasing a set of these radios to help keep in touch with friends and family.
They offer fantastic short range communication which can be very useful in poor mobile signal areas. They are cheap to buy, license free and universally compatible with other makes and brands making larger networks very easy.

What is PMR 446?

Personal Mobile Radio (PMR) is a European license free citizens band radio system operating on the 446Mhz UHF FM frequency using 16 channels. Most consumer walkie talkies use the first 8 channels. So generally you will just be using channels 1-8 exclusively.

PMR Channel	Frequency (MHz)
1	446.00625
2	446.01875
3	446.03125
4	446.04375
5	446.05625
6	446.06875
7	446.08125
8	446.09375
9	446.10625
10	446.11875
11	446.13125
12	446.14375
13	446.15625
14	446.16875
15	446.18125
16	446.19375

It is completely open frequency to use as you like. Walkers, bikers, small businesses or kids playing down the garden all share the basic 8 channels.
As everyone has to shares these channels they can become congested so added features like ctcss and DCS squelch coding (on certain Handsets) allow the user/group to talk with no channel chatter interference.
This system has become very popular across Europe......