wythall radio club

Members of Wythall Radio Club have been living up to our club motto and having lots of fun with RF this weekend with our “Islands On The Air” station, M5W.

Stan G4JGV on the “Graveyard” shift!

Masterminded by Callum M0MCX, a hardy group of members has been up on Wythall Park all weekend, braving the rain to try to make as many contacts as they can, while remaining as dry as possible!

Stan G4JGV was reportedly on air all night on SSB and CW, whilst Rob 2E0MEX, Mark M0MSE, Dave G3YXM and of course, Callum M0MCX and others took turns on the microphone. James M0YOM and Lee G0MTN also helped out and gave some of the overnighters a little rest! Other members lending support included Colin M0GJM, Mike G4VPD and John G4OJL.

Needless to say, the intrepid team have been somewhat damp(!) but are now drying out after a busy weekend. It doesn’t help when the coaxial cable needs changing in the middle of a downpour!

Doubtless there will be more up-to-date news to report from M5W very soon…

This coming weekend, 27th and 28th July, sees Wythall Radio Club members taking part in one of the premier international contests of the year.

“Islands on the Air” is the Radio Society of Great Britain’s international contest event. It involves working as many islands as possible during the weekend and is hugely popular all over the world.

Wythall Radio Club member and top UK Contester, Lee G0MTN, is planning to enthuse us all to have a go in this year’s event with a talk this Tuesday evening. Entitled “IOTA Contest Tales from Four Countries” , Lee will be taking a retrospective glance at the contest and some of his own personal activities in it over the last 15 years!

It will be a very relaxed evening with lots of photos and tales of putting together both large and small stations in different part of the world. Just what we need to get us into the IOTA mood!

2030 this Tuesday in the shack at Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall B47 6LZ. If you are reading this and have been contemplating popping along, this would be a great evening to be a first-time visitor!

There is a rumour going around that there could be a bigger entry from the club than expected this year too – more news soon… :-)

Wythall Radio Club member Barry M0DGQ is not one for sitting around idly in his hobby. Most club members know Barry as one of the leading lights in our Morse Code revolution, but he is also well known in Wythall Radio Club and indeed around the UK, for his construction exploits.

His latest “bit of fun” is  a new Morse Code transceiver, primarily for use on holidays. It is small and lightweight, thus making it ideal for air travel. Covering the 40m, 20m and 10m Amateur bands, it is capable of a full 20 watts output power – a very useful amount given its design brief.

With full CW break-in and a measured 1 microvolt sensitivity, this represents a fantastic piece of kit.  Listen out for Barry this summer – you may well be working him on a radio he built himself!

In the rush to become a licensed Radio Amateur and get “on the air”, it is all too easy to overlook some very important aspects of safety. The possibility of a lightning strike for example, is something that all Wythall Radio Club members should be aware of. But another area for some essential knowledge is in that of the role of Earthing in the Ham Radio station.

So this Tuesday at Wythall Radio Club, we have a specialist Guest Speaker coming to visit us to demystify these aspects of our hobby. Mack M0CUS BEng CEng M.I.E.E is our guest speaker and as an Electrical specialist, there isn’t much he doesn’t know about this subject! We are expecting another fascinating talk and visitors are of course very welcome.

Tuesday 16th July at 2030 in the Darts Room at Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall B47 6LZ. We hope to see you there!

Wythall Radio Club is pleased to announce that Dawn, wife of club member John M1JSS, has now received her Foundation licence callsign.

She will be joining the ever growing ranks of female Wythall Radio Club members with her new callsign, M6UDY.

Dawn finally received her callsign late yesterday but by 8pm had apparently already used it on air. We are all looking forward to hearing her on air from her home location near Bromsgrove and maybe mobile too!

Congratulations Dawn from us all at Wythall Radio Club and here’s to many happy years “on the air”!

Members of Wythall Radio Club have been having lots of fun this weekend! Making the most of the fantastic weather on offer in the UK at the moment, our members took to a field in Wythall Park to have a weekend of “playing radio”.

Two radio stations were built to take part in the UK’s National VHF contest with masts loaded with various antennas for several bands. Members also bought along their own personal masts and portable stations to make a number of short-wave stations.

Much fun was had at the Saturday Night Barbecue with around 64 folk attending, making this year’s Field Day one of the best in living memory, according to some of the longest standing members. The fun we had and the people whose company we enjoyed will live long in the memory.

Another highlight this year was a prize raffle for club funds with prizes donated to the club from Kenwood (UK). It has to be said that the Kenwood items were the most coveted in the raffle and were the first to be gone!

The biggest question now is, can we please have the same weather next year? :-)

Meantime, here’s a selection of photos to give a flavour of a little of our weekend…

Next weekend, 6th and 7th July, sees one of the Radio Society of Great Britain’s premier contest events, VHF National Field Day and members of Wythall Radio Club are gearing up to take part and have yet more fun with RF!

The general idea is that stations take to the great outdoors and set up stations literally “in the field” and then try to make as many contacts as possible for 24 hours. Five VHF Amateur bands are used, 50Mhz, 70 MHz, 144 MHz, 432 MHz and 1296 MHz.

Wythall Radio Club’s idea of a good VHF Field Day however, is to have as many members as possible on Wythall Park playing a mix of radio, both VHF and HF, heavy duty contesting and combining that with eating food, drinking beer and telling tall stories well into the night. (Occasionally even radio comes second to beer!)

All this takes a modicum of planning though and this Tuesday evening we will putting the finishing touches to our Field Day plans and making sure all is ready for the following weekend.

Feel free to come along and see what the fuss is about. 2030 in the Club shack at Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall. B47 6LZ.

Fox-hunting with hounds may be illegal in the UK but for members of Wythall Radio Club, fox-hunting means something altogether different!

Phil 2E0WTH tries to get a bearing on the “fox”!

The radio form of fox-hunting involves someone hiding somewhere in the countryside and transmitting regular bursts of signal. The rest of us are out and about in the same general area of countryside trying to get bearings on where the “fox” is transmitting from. Before too long (hopefully!) the “fox” is found and the finders become the new prey.

Admittedly it may look like grown-ups playing hide-and-seek with radio, but whatever, it is a lot of fun! Wythall Radio Club puts on a fox-hunt over the Christmas period but this year the enthusiasm is back to get out in the late summer evening light that we have at the moment.

Chris G0EYO is a leading light in the Wythall Fox-hunt department and will be giving a short presentation this coming Tuesday in advance of our actual fox hunt this coming Friday evening. He will be covering how the event works, some basic principles of hunting, using a compass, taking a bearing, and other useful information.

Why not come along and see what the fun is all about? Tuesday 25th June at 2030 in the club shack at Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall. B47 6LZ

One of Wythall Radio Club’s most active “homebrewers” is busy again! Barry M0DGQ reports that construction has started on an ambitious new all band, all mode HF transceiver.

Using a Direct Digital Synthesiser (DDS) for the VFO, the controller is a two-PIC circuit, which can be found here. It has all the bells and whistles of an upmarket commercial transceiver with such niceties as dual VFO’s, memories & splits.

Ingeniously, Barry has used bits and pieces from redundant equipment – for example, he has salvaged the keypad from an old telephone unit and the blue switch array from a discarded fax machine. This is doubly advantageous as the buttons are both easy to use and see for us amateurs of advancing years! :-)

As Barry himself admits, “…by today’s demanding standards, this would not be suitable for a contest grade receiver due to the low level spurious outputs on the higher frequencies as these can mix with very strong out of band signals, however with good front end band pass filtering, this radio should be fine for most uses.”

We look forward to progress reports and to seeing the finished article!

Wythall Radio Club put on a superb Special Event Radio Station on Saturday 11th May 2013 for Mills on the Air, activating Danzey Green Windmill, hence the call GB1DGW.

A full report will follow. For the time being, this is the beginning of the photographs.