Derek MacCallum, 51, overcame challenges such as his tandem cycle catching fire to complete the tour of six test match cricket grounds in England last year.

The long-term cricket fan said his recognition from the Queen for his charity work and participation in amateur radio emergency network, RAYNET, has inspired him to tackle a second charity cycle.

Last year’s challenge was named the Mad Cricket Cycle and next year Derek plans to carry out the Mad Football Cycle, riding a tandem from Dingwall to Kilmarnock in a week via as many football grounds as possible.

And he faces an extra challenge, switching from the side-by-side tandem Fun2Go to the more common style of tandem with a cyclist front and back.

Derek has been blind since birth which makes balancing on a traditional tandem even harder but he is determined to overcome this, and is already in training for the event, which takes place next April.

The father-of-one said he decided to take on the first challenge after having both his eyes removed in 2013.

He said: “I had never had sore eyes in my life and I woke up with sore eyes one day in 2012. Doctors said they had deteriorated from the inside out. They tried different things for a year but then talked to me about removing them. They took them out in 2013 and I’ve been fine since. I’ve got artificial eyes and people tell me that you can’t tell the difference.

“That’s what started all this, I decided to try and be more active and get my blood pressure down.” Derek cycled from Headlingley in Leeds to Lords in London in a week – at one point having a new bike ordered from Holland overnight when the one he and his tandem partner, his tax office colleague Katrina Ferrie, had caught fire.

The pair raised £5,000 for Yorkhill Hospital in Glasgow, chosen as Derek’s daughter Sarah, 19, spent much of her childhood there being treated for genetic tumour disorder neurofibromatosis For his next charity endeavour Derek has teamed up with Colin Young, of Dumbarton, again raising money for Yorkhill.

They plan to set off from Dingwall on April 30 next year, heading to Inverness, Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee, Edinburgh, Motherwell, Hamilton, Glasgow and Kilmarnock within seven days.

At the moment, Derek isn’t planning to head to the Bet Butler Stadium in his hometown but hasn’t totally ruled out a visit yet.

He met Colin through RAYNET – a network of ham radio enthusiasts which provides an emergency radio network.

The volunteers provide communications at events as practice to help out during major disasters, such as the Lockerbie plane crash.

Derek was part of the organisation for 30 years and controller for the Renfrewshire Group, later known as Renfrewshire and West Dunbartonshire and now Greater Glasgow, for 12 years.

He stepped down in recent years due to family commitments but said the MBE, which also recognised his commitment to voluntary service, was a wake-up call.

He said: “When I got the MBE it kicked me up the backside and I thought, I need to do something else. That’s when I thought of the Mad Football Cycle.” Derek added when his wife Christine read him the letter telling him he had the MBE he was ‘stunned beyond belief’.

He said: “We had been invited to the Royal Garden Party and we understood that if you were going to meet someone that you would get a second letter, so I though it would be that. I was shocked, absolutely stunned.”