The TOG radio crew will be heading to County Kildare on Sunday, 18 October, for the Kildare Amateur Radio Club Buy & Sell Extravaganza.
We will have a TOG and EI0TOG table at the event, so come over and say hello. We will be happy to chat about the hackerspace, our radio shack, our amateur radio activities and the projects our members have been working on.
The event brings together amateur radio operators, CB operators, shortwave listeners, clubs and traders from across the island of Ireland. It is an opportunity to buy, sell or swap surplus radio equipment—or simply meet old friends and talk radio.
There should be a wide range of equipment available, including radios, antennas, receivers, power supplies, SWR and power meters, antenna tuners, handheld radios, repeaters, cables, fittings and plenty more.
Event details
Date: Sunday, 18 October 2026 Time: 11am to 1:30pm Venue: Kill GAA Football Club, Kill Village, Co. Kildare Eircode: W91 XP95 Admission: €5 per person; children under 12 go free
There is ample parking at the clubhouse, with easy access from the N7 and M7.
The clubhouse bar will open at 12 noon for refreshments, with lunches available from 12:30pm onwards.
Anyone who has surplus equipment to sell can book a table free of charge by emailing info@kildarearc.com. Traders will be admitted from 10am to allow time to set up.
Further details are available from the Kildare Amateur Radio Club:
We are looking forward to meeting everyone on the day. We will also try not to return to TOG with more radio equipment than we brought—but no promises.
We are taking the TOG repair tools on the road again.
On Thursday 17 September, TOG volunteers will be at Ace Enterprise Park in Bawnogue for a free Repair Café. The event is part of The Autumn Reset, Ace Enterprise Park’s Circular Economy Week.
Do you have a broken household item sitting at home? Bring it along and see if we can help give it another chance.
At a Repair Café, the idea is not simply to hand something over to be fixed. You sit down with a volunteer repairer, open it up together and try to work out what has gone wrong. We cannot promise that everything can be repaired, but we will give it a good look and hopefully share some useful skills along the way.
Repair Cafés help keep useful items in service for longer, reduce waste and make repair a little less mysterious.
Event details
Date: Thursday 17 September 2026
Time: 12:00 to 16:00
Location: Ace Enterprise Park, Bawnogue, Dublin 22
Eircode: D22 P6E8
Cost: Free
Free parking is available on site.
Full details and free registration are available on Eventbrite.
Read all about our member Jeffrey‘s trip to The Circular Square.
On Saturday 5 September I put my bicycle on an Irish Rail train in Dublin and headed south to Clonmel. With the bike safely in its rack and the panniers packed, it was a pleasantly straightforward start to a three-day trip running through to Monday 7 September.
The main reason for travelling was a weekend of repair and Linux workshops at The Circular Square. Around that, I had plans for some cycling, portable amateur radio and a little monument photography. It sounds like several different weekends packed into one, but they fitted together rather well.
It was Tuesday Open Night at TOG, and once again there was an interesting bit of equipment sitting on the electronics bench.
This time it was a Rohde & Schwarz ESH 3 test receiver, part of a recent donation from Testwall. It covers frequencies from 9 kHz to 30 MHz and was designed as a serious piece of test equipment rather than an ordinary radio receiver.
As you may know, TOG also has an amateur radio club, with the callsign EI0TOG. A radio receiver like this is complete overkill for simply listening to amateur radio, which naturally meant that it caught our attention.
We did what any group of makers would do: we took it apart.
After plenty of poking around, checking voltages and trying to understand the collection of boards inside, we found a few blown fuses, some jammed buttons and a wire from the power supply that appeared to be stopping the unit from turning on when it was plugged in.
We disconnected the troublesome wire, replaced the fuses and tried powering it up again.
There was no magic smoke. Instead, we had lights!
It is not completely repaired yet. The receiver still displays an error message when it starts and is unhappy about some of its calibration settings. That did not stop us from wanting to find out whether it could receive anything.
We connected a length of wire as a very makeshift indoor antenna and tuned to the 40-metre amateur radio band, around 7 MHz. At first, we were not hearing very much. That was hardly surprising given our poor antenna, its position inside the building and all the electrical noise around the space.
Then a station from Italy came booming through the speaker. They must have been putting out a good signal to overcome our antenna arrangement and all the other things working against us.
After a little more experimenting with the front panel, we figured out enough of the interface to select single-sideband reception and tune around properly. Despite its remaining faults, this old piece of test equipment was receiving amateur radio again.
It was a great example of repair and of bringing something back to life rather than simply throwing it away.
We would still like to understand what the ESH 3 was originally used for and how to operate all of its test and measurement functions properly. Does anyone remember using one of these when it first came out, or know their way around this kind of equipment?
Even if we never manage to use every specialised feature, the amateur radio enthusiasts at TOG will find some use for it. Who knows, with a proper HF antenna connected, it might even become genuinely useful.
Across the different TOG spaces, we have always had some form of shelf where unwanted items could find a new home.
Back in 2014, we wrote about our Two Shelves system. Items left around the space were placed on the shelves, where they could be collected by their owners, picked up for a new project or eventually cleared out.
The shelves have changed over the years as TOG has moved from one building to another. In our current space, the idea has a new name but the same great feeling behind it. It is now called the Rehome Shelf.
The idea is simple. If you see something on the shelf that you could use, take it away and give it a new home. You might find a book, a cable, an electronic component, a tool, a toy or the missing part for your next project.
Members can also leave useful and interesting items on the shelf for someone else. Something that is no longer useful to one person could be exactly what another person needs.
The shelf now has a new sign, and even the sign has been rehomed. It started life as another sign that someone was looking to dispose of. With a little paint, some design work and a trip through our laser cutter, it has been given a new life as the sign for the Rehome Shelf.
It is a small example of what the shelf is all about. We want useful items to stay in use for as long as possible instead of ending up in landfill. Sometimes an old item only needs the right person, a new idea or a little bit of work to become useful again.
The next time you are in TOG, have a look at the Rehome Shelf. You never know what you might find.
Take what you like, or leave something interesting.
Over the past few weeks, we have been putting some new equipment into use around TOG thanks to support from the Local Enhancement Programme 2026.
The programme supports community and voluntary organisations with capital equipment that helps strengthen local community activity. In Dublin, it is funded by theDepartment of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht, through the Dublin City Local Community Development Committee (LCDC) and Dublin City Council.
For us, the aim was fairly simple: make our public nights, workshops and community events safer, better organised and easier for our volunteers to run.
Already being put to use
Some of the most visible additions are our new outdoor event gazebos.
The day brought heritage blacksmith Fínín Líam Christie to TOG for a day of traditional forge work, hands-on participation and demonstrations exploring the skills associated with the United Irishmen, the 1798 Rebellion and Robert Emmet’s 1803 Rising. The gazebos gave us a much more useful covered outdoor area around the forge and remained in use for our Open Social Night afterwards.
That is exactly the sort of thing we hoped this funding would allow us to do. Rather than equipment for a single event, these are things we can bring out again and again for our monthly socials, workshops and other public activities.
Making the space safer and easier to use
We have also installed new Safety & Wellbeing equipment around the space, including new first aid and emergency burn kits.
Alongside this, we have added equipment to help with temporary power and trip hazards during events, better signage and equipment for managing our outdoor area.
They may not be the most exciting things in a hackerspace, but they make a real difference when you are welcoming groups of people into a busy workshop and trying to run events safely.
We have also added new waste separation bins for paper, plastics and general waste. Our social nights can involve quite a few people, and usually quite a lot of pizza, so making it clearer and easier for everyone to separate waste was another practical improvement we wanted to make.
Supporting an open community space
TOG hosts three public access nights each week as well as workshops, talks, community events and our monthly Open Social Night. These are opportunities for people to visit the space, meet others, learn new skills and get involved without needing to be a member.
The equipment funded through the Local Enhancement Programme will be used across all of these activities for years to come. It helps us provide a space that is safer and better organised while giving us more options for bringing activities outdoors and welcoming larger groups.
This fits closely with Goal 4 of the Dublin City Local Economic and Community Plan 2024–2029, which aims to foster communities that are “more sustainable, thriving, safe, caring, welcoming and inclusive.”
A big thank you to the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht, the Dublin City Local Community Development Committee, and Dublin City Council for supporting TOG through the Local Enhancement Programme 2026.
We are already making good use of the new equipment, and you can expect to see plenty more of it at TOG events over the coming years.
