Category: News

Posted on

Radio & Retro Weekend at TOG: 24–25 October 2026

Join us at TOG Hackerspace for a weekend of amateur radio, hands-on workshops, old technology and a bit of messing.

On Saturday, we’ll be building satellite ground stations, trying packet radio, making callsign patches and putting soldering skills to the test. There will be live demonstrations and afternoon talks, followed by our October Open Social and pizza night.

Sunday starts with radio in the park, before we return to TOG for an afternoon of vintage radios, retro computers, consoles and restoration projects.

Radio amateurs, shortwave listeners, makers and curious newcomers are all welcome. You don’t need a radio licence to attend.

Book your place

There are three separate Eventbrite listings, so you can book the parts of the weekend you’d like to attend:

The Sunday morning Parks on the Air session is an open outdoor meetup and does not need an Eventbrite ticket.

Saturday 24 October: Radio Day

10:00–11:30 | Build Your Own Satellite Ground Station

Start the weekend with a hands-on introduction to TinyGS, a network of small ground stations receiving satellite signals using LoRa hardware.

Learn how these stations work and get started with building your own. This workshop has separate booking from the afternoon Radio Day.

Book the satellite ground station workshop

From 12:00 | Live radio demos and callsign patches

Drop in from noon to explore the equipment, meet the operators and try some making.

Pump-up mast with Ben Field, EI9IUB

Ben will demonstrate his trailer-mounted mast, built around an ex-MOD Sankey trailer and a Clark SCAM 12 mast. The setup normally carries a hexbeam antenna and rotator, with a dipole for the lower bands.

Come and see how it works and chat about setting up a portable radio station.

Packet radio with Victor, EI5IYB

Earlier this year, TOG joined the packet radio network. Vic will give practical demonstrations of connecting to and using it, and introduce the applications built on top of the network.

Discover how computers communicate over radio, with uses including messaging, group chat and news and weather services. Thanks to the Online Amateur Radio Community (OARC) for supporting this part of the programme.

Make your own callsign patch with Tree

Tree will be on hand throughout the day to demonstrate TOG’s new industrial embroidery machine and help visitors make their own callsign patches.

Learn how the machine works and see your callsign turned into a patch. Thanks to the Irish Radio Transmitters Society for part-funding the consumables through its Promoting Amateur Radio Fund. Donations towards material costs are welcome.

13:00 and 14:00 | Advanced soldering workshops

Already know how to solder and want a new challenge? We have a range of kits for you to try, with instructors on hand to help you get started and work through the tricky bits.

These informal workshops start at 13:00 and 14:00. Kits cost €10–€20, depending on which you choose, and soldering irons are provided.

Afternoon | Radio talks

Three talks will bring us together for a closer look at different sides of radio in collaboration with Engineers Ireland Electronic and Computing Division . The programme includes

15:00 | Making Room for the Whimsical in Amateur Radio – Jeffrey Roe, EI7IRB

From Toilets on the Air to sending cat pictures with EI0MEOW, amateur radio has plenty of room for a bit of messing. Jeffrey explores playful projects, lightbulb antennas and Halloween Morse events, asking how we can encourage unusual ideas in our clubs.

A talk about curiosity, experimentation and enjoying radio simply because it makes us smile.

16:00 | Radiosondes: Radio and Weather Balloons – Met Éireann

An introduction to radiosondes, the instruments carried by weather balloons, and how radio is used to send atmospheric measurements back to the ground.

17:00 | Radio skills, skills for life – Vic, EI5IYB

Amateur Radio is a technical hobby but not only. It is a hobby of many hobbies, from mechanical engineering and communication skills to project management. In this talk, Vic will explore the skills that are gained in the ham radio hobby and how they transfer into your personal and professional life.

See the Saturday Eventbrite listing for the current talk timetable and full speaker line-up

From 18:00 | TOG Open Social & Pizza Night

Stay around after the talks for TOG’s October Open Social. We’ll fire up the pizza oven, meet members and visitors, show off projects and keep the radio, electronics and making chats going into the evening.

Book your free place for Saturday’s Radio Day, talks and social

Sunday 25 October: Radio in the Park & Retro Day

10:30–12:30 | Parks on the Air at Lansdowne Valley Park

We’ll start Sunday outdoors with a Parks on the Air (POTA) activation at Lansdowne Valley Park Recreation Park.

Come and see a portable amateur radio station in action. We’ll get on the air, including calling into the South Dublin Radio Club Sunday net and listening to and checking in after the IRTS Sunday News on 2 metres.

It’s a chance to see how a station can be taken out into a park and put on the air, or to join other operators for a morning of portable radio.

14:00–18:00 | Retro Radio & Computing Day

Sunday afternoon is for old radios, glowing screens and technology that still has plenty of stories to tell.

Our Retro Day returns with a special focus on vintage radio and communications equipment, alongside retro computers, consoles, games, test equipment and unusual electronics.

Members, radio clubs, collectors and visitors are invited to bring equipment to demonstrate and restoration projects to talk about. Working machines and projects still in progress are both welcome.

Have something to show? Email info@tog.ie with what you’d like to bring, how much table space you need and any power or display requirements.

Come along to exhibit, try some old technology or simply have a look and a chat. Please ask the owner before operating any equipment.

Book your free place for Retro Radio & Computing Day

Getting to TOG

All activities take place at TOG Hackerspace, Unit 1B Motor City, Kylemore Road, Dublin 12, D12 CF6V, apart from Sunday morning’s POTA session at Lansdowne Valley Park.

TOG is a short walk from the Kylemore stop on the Luas Red Line. See our location page for directions. For access questions or other event enquiries, email info@tog.ie.

Radio Day and Retro Day have free entry. Advanced soldering kits cost €10–€20, and donations towards callsign patch materials are welcome. Check the separate satellite workshop listing for its ticket details.

With thanks

The weekend is made possible with support from Dublin City Council.

Thanks also to the IRTS Promoting Amateur Radio Fund for part-funding callsign patch materials, and the Online Amateur Radio Community for supporting the packet radio activities.

Come for a workshop, bring an old radio, join us in the park or stay for the whole weekend. We look forward to seeing you.

Posted on

Sharing TOG’s Citizen Science Story

We’re delighted to congratulate TOG member Jeffrey Roe, who has co-authored a chapter with Jack R. Lehane in Care, Health and Housing: Crisis, Experiences and Answers.

Edited by Lidia Katia C. Manzo and published by Policy Press on 28 September 2026, the book explores the connections between housing conditions, health and care. TOG’s citizen science workshops are part of that story.

Jeffrey and Jack’s contribution is Chapter 8, “Grassroots citizen science and indoor air quality networks: tools for understanding inadequate social housing conditions.” It looks at how affordable sensors and community involvement can help people understand conditions in their homes and gather evidence to support calls for improvements.

For Jeffrey, it all started with a citizen science workshop. Sharing the practical work we were doing led to conversations about housing and health, an invitation to contribute, and eventually this collaboration.

If you have taken part in one of our air quality workshops, some of the chapter will feel familiar. It describes people coming together to assemble their own sensors, learn how they work and share environmental data. There are also photographs from TOG workshops, showing participants building enclosures and putting their devices together.

Over the years, we have brought these activities to different communities, including our work with the Abbeyleix Climate Action Project and our Build Your Own Air Quality Sensor workshop for Science Week. Participants learn practical electronics skills while contributing to a shared understanding of the air around them.

The chapter connects that hands-on learning with a wider question: how can communities use the knowledge and tools they build together to improve the places where they live?

It’s lovely to see work that starts around our workshop tables become part of a book. Congratulations to Jeffrey and Jack, thank you to Lidia for bringing the publication together, and thanks to all the volunteers and participants who make these workshops possible.

The whole book is open access, so you can read it online for free. You’ll find Jeffrey and Jack’s chapter on pages 147–164. A paperback edition is also available.

Posted on

New toy! An industrial embroidery machine!

A tog member stands in front of the embroidery machine, showing off a piece of embroidery in a hoop

If you’ve been in the space recently, you might have see our newest toy tool, a 12 colour, industrial, embroidery machine! Many of our members are very excited about it, so we started showing members how to use it and will be opening it up to a wider audience in the coming weeks with workshops on how to design for embroidery machines.

The machine is a secondhand ZSK Sprint 5, made in Germany in 2012. It’s passed through a few hands before coming to us, but it’s in great condition, and we’re going to get many years of use out of it yet! It’s able to embroider areas up to 30 by 30 cm and can automatically change colours and cut the threads. We also have a cap attachment for it, but let’s start with flatter surfaces first.

A grey hoop with grey fabric mounted in it. the numbers 1 to 12 are stitched out in different colours. Apart from 8 which appears to be mangled.

As it’s a 90 kg beast, one of our members built a table to handle the weight. We’ve put the machine in the small room with the laser cutter as it’s quite noisy, but it tends to move a lot, so we couldn’t put it upstairs by the 3D printers or they’d be very sad.

A metal legged table with a box top made from OSB and a nice bit of ply

Of course, as a hackerspace, we’re not out buying the manufacturer’s closed software but we are delighted to be able to use a variety of open source software with it. The machine takes .dst files, which are an industry standard supported by many open source tools. The main workhorse software is Inkscape with the plugin Ink/Stitch. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s extremely flexible. There’s also the option to use PEmbroider with Processing, and we can’t forget TurtleStitch for those interested in machine embroidery as an educational tool as well as for art. Expect some design workshops to pop up over the coming months!

If you simply want to gaze at its majesty, drop in on any of our open evenings. On craft night, you’re most likely to find the machine embroidery nerds, so pack a craft project and stick around after getting to know our newest toy and its biggest fans.

An early test embroider. The white fabric is still mounted in the hoop. It has a black duck with the text tog.ie in green. Below that is testing testing one two
Posted on

Repair, Radio and a Bicycle: Clonmel to Waterford

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.

Continue reading “Repair, Radio and a Bicycle: Clonmel to Waterford”
Posted on

New Equipment Supporting Our Community Events at TOG

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 the Department 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.

They did not have to wait very long for their first outing. We used both of them during our recent Forging History – Metalworking and the 1798 & 1803 Uprisings event for National Heritage Week.

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.

Posted on

TOG at South Dublin’s Community Circular Economy Day

TOG Hackerspace is delighted to be taking part in the Free Community Circular Economy Day in Tallaght on Wednesday, 19th August 2026.

Organised by South Dublin County Council, the free event brings together community groups and repairers for a day focused on repairing, reusing, swapping and giving things a second life.

The event takes place at Fettercairn Community and Youth Centre, Tallaght, D24 W92N, from 10am to 4pm, with a large Repair Café, Clothing Swap and Community Plant Swap.

TOG at the Repair Café

TOG members will be taking part in the Repair Café alongside repairers from the Rediscovery Centre, with our main focus on electronics repair.

Bring along a small electrical or electronic item that has stopped working and we’ll see if we can help diagnose the problem and, where possible, get it working again.

We’ll be helping with:

  • 🔌 Small electrical appliances
  • 💡 Lamps
  • 🧸 Electronic toys
  • 🍳 Kitchen gadgets
  • 📱 Handheld devices
  • 💬 Advice on larger repair and upcycling projects

Where possible, you’ll get a chance to work alongside the repairers, learn what has gone wrong and pick up some useful repair skills.

Repair spaces are available on a first-come, first-served basis, with a maximum of two items per person.

More to Repair and Reuse

The wider Repair Café will also include help with:

  • 🚲 Bike repair and maintenance
  • 🧵 Clothing and textile repair
  • 🪑 Furniture repair
  • 🔌 Electronics repair

There will also be a Clothing Swap and Community Plant Swap, giving people more ways to reuse, share and keep useful items in circulation.

Event Details

Free Community Circular Economy Day
📅 Wednesday, 19th August 2026
🕙 10:00am – 4:00pm
📍 Fettercairn Community and Youth Centre, Tallaght, D24 W92N
🎟️ Free – registration required

👉 Register on Eventbrite

We’re looking forward to bringing some of TOG’s repair skills out into the community and hopefully giving a few broken gadgets another chance at life.