wythall radio club

This Saturday, 8th December, is a very special date in Wythall Radio Club’s Calendar. It is the date for our annual Christmas Party! Members come along and bring friends & family and we basically just have a lot of fun together!

We hire one of the larger rooms (with bar of course!) at Wythall House and have a mixture of excellent food and drink (in the “American Supper” style), live entertainment, games, raffles, and even a skittle alley!

Great chat, a relaxed friendly atmosphere and a “no pressure” environment, it’s the perfect way to start the festive season off with friends. This Saturday in the Britannia Room at Wythall House, Sliver Street, Wythall from 19:00.

What a fun day! Our first club visit to Martin Lynch’s shop in Chertsey, Surrey.

Six of us made the trip down a frosty, foggy M40 early this morning to enjoy the ML&S open day & hog roast and we were not disappointed! We arrived around 8.30am to find a Car Park space reserved for our Chairman Mike G4VPD. He won’t live that down in a hurry!

We then spent a happy few hours browsing the shop, enjoying a breakfast of unlimited free bacon sandwiches, free drinks and very friendly chat with the ML&S staff.

G5HY from Kenwood(UK) presents Mike G4VPD with our £600 voucher

This was also the day when we were presented with our £600 voucher, won in the ML&S raffle at the National Hamfest in September, to spend in store. Kenwood’s David Wilkins G5HY was on hand to present the voucher, which was very promptly exchanged in part payment for a Kenwood TS-590S!

Needless to say, there were a few other pre-Christmas deals done and Santa obviously came VERY early for all the members who travelled down!

A hot pork lunch and more drinks and soon it was time to leave, but not before we felt we had made a few new friends in the South-East.

Many thanks to Martin, Richard and all the staff and Martin’s family at ML&S. We look forward to seeing you again in the New Year.

We operated as G7WAC from 1,000 feet in the Cotswolds at about 2.5c. It was very cold but very amusing and great fun. A picture tells a thousand words so perhaps you might skip to the sequence below.

125 QSOs, FT1000MP, Full size inverted V 160m Dipole at 65 feet AGL. Dipole legs were cut at 37 metres each leg giving us a tune-up at 1.850. Ideally, the maths told me to cut another metre off, but we ran out of time to become operational just 6 minutes before the off at 19:54.

Operators, Stu M0NYP, Jon, M0JMM and myself Callum, M0MCX. Thanks for working us.

One of the perennial favourite contests in the RSGB Contest Calendar is fast approaching.

The “Club Calls” Contest, originated by the Verulam Radio Club, has always been a fun relaxed event on 160m. Wythall Radio Club started taking part in this contest a little more seriously over the last two years.  In 2011, our club station actually managed to finish in 3rd place and won a certificate!

This year the event is on the evening of Saturday November 10th (2000-2300) and we are hoping to try to get as high as possible in the results table, but it has to be said, we do treat the event as a fun event first!

Dave G3YXM (of “Olympics” fame – see the previous post) is our lead member when it come to this event and has been entering it in one guise or another for many years. This Tuesday at our regular club meeting he is going to tell us a bit more about the history of the contest, how easy it is to enter it and what we can do to improve our standings in the results table!

As always, it will be a fun event. 2030 in the Club Shack this Tuesday 23rd October, at Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall B47 6LZ. See you there?

Thanks to stalwart members, Darren and Carol (a.k.a. the Welsh Contingent!), and aided & abetted by several other Wythall Radio Club members, the weekend’s Special Event Station at the Stoke Prior Steam Fair was a great success!

While the beer tent and entertainment was doubtless a great draw,(!) on the radio front a lot of fun was had, with quite a few pile-ups over the weekend. There was not too much in the way of long distance working to be had, but one highlight was working another Special Event station also operating from a steam fair! Now that IS spooky!

Click the photos below to get some idea of the fun that was had. And why not take a peek at http://photobucket.com/stokeprior for more?

This weekend you will find Wythall Radio Club members out literally “in the field!”

Image © R G Newman 2012

Down at Stoke Prior, a village not too far from Wythall, the annual Autumn Steam Rally is taking place across the weekend and Wythall Radio Club puts on an Amateur Special Event Station in the rally field to coincide with it. We operate on 40m, 2m and sometimes other bands too and our aim is always to have fun!

Watch out for Darren GW7HOC & family as well as Les M0COK and others manning the station on the field this weekend.

For more information about this popular event, or to plan a visit, you can click the link below to the rally website – it gives you all the information you need to know!  http://www.shakespearesrally.com/Stoke_Prior.htm

I am happy to report that SSB Field Day went according to plan. We entered the unrestricted section although with only a fan-dipole for 80, 40 and 20m at 45 feet. We did run an amplifier though. 811 contacts made with many more dupes than I can remember. Lots of fun, laughs and we even slept the night. The days of 24×7 operating finally over for the old duffers?

Pictures score more points than words. Check these out.

144 MHz or 2 metres is probably the most popular amateur band for local or semi-local contacts.

However, tomorrow it will be full of low power or QRP stations trying to make contacts far and wide in the annual Practical Wireless 2m QRP contest.

 All modes from FM to SSB and CW are allowed and it’s a great opportunity to snag some new squares or work some hilltoppers. All you have to remember is that no more than 3w is allowed as your output power.

This is a great chance to get out onto some high spots for an hour or so too and see how many stations can be worked.

So if you are at a loose end tomorrow, why not take part? Even a small antenna such as a tiny yagi or halo for horizontal polarisation will work.  The usual antenna types for vertical polarisation will also give good results.

See  http://www.pwcontest.org.uk/144MHzrules.html for more details and remember, have fun with RF!

No-one can surely have failed to notice that the UK is celebrating something special this weekend (and we don’t mean 2 extra days public holiday!)

“Her Maj” is rightly the centre of attention this coming weekend and we at Wythall Radio Club are also taking part in her celebrations.

We will be joining in with the village activities this Sunday and Monday with a Special Event Station to mark the Jubilee. Listen out for the callsign GQ4WAC  and feel free to contact us (most likely on the 80 metre, 40 metre, 20 metre, and 2 metre bands).

Catch you on the air!

What a fascinating evening last night! Thanks to Steve G3ZVW, we experienced an amazing hour of “whole-brain learning”!

Three “volunteers” (if you can call Steven 2E0SDD, Stacey M6STJ and Howard M6AUL that) managed to learn the vast majority of all 26 letters of the alphabet in around 60 minutes. That is thanks to the method known as Instant Morse. Using a mix of storytelling, picture imagination and letter shapes, Steve took us through the letters of the alphabet while helping us with the CW equivalents.

It will be a long time, for instance, before we forget Mel M0MAJ’s cocktail glasses and fancy bow-tie or, come to think of it, Chris G0EYO’s mouth with the tomato in it! (You just had to be there!!!)

Callum M0MCX obviously didn’t forget anything however – at the end of the evening he could remember all 26 characters in code! (I didn’t write that! Callum.)