Taxing times

Today I'd planned to finish the breadboard TX of the Tenbox 10m AM transceiver and do some range tests locally. The plan was to put the TX on at home with a PC voice recording and drive around with the FT817 and the Tenbox super-regen to see what sort of range was reliably possible.

Instead, I started to do my annual HM Revenue and Customs tax return, a task I hate doing as so much form filling is needed and lots of bits of paper have to be found in order to fill it all in. I do mine online, so the deadline is the end of Jan 2013. Starting at about 10am it took me until 4pm to complete, not because of the complexity of my affairs particularly, but because I couldn't find all the bits of data I needed. On their website they have a nice picture of a guy smiling away whilst filling in his form online. I spent about 6 hours pulling what little hair I have left out!  A reminder that the deadline for online self-assessment tax returns in the UK is Jan 31st 2013, or you get a fine.

Anyway, job done. Yet again I owe money - why do they never owe me money? - and will pay up in the next few weeks. So, a boring, tedious, annual task done and this week I can return to the interesting amateur radio project stuff.