Last night, the members of Wythall Radio Club were having great fun at the annual Christmas shindig at Wythall House.
On the basis that a picture tells a thousand words, enjoy this montage, courtesy of “official” photographer, Stu M0NYP
We’ve been waiting for the best part of 2014 but it has finally happened. GB3WL, the Wythall UHF Repeater is now on the air!
The Notice of Variation to keeper Dave G3YXM’s licence came through this Monday lunchtime and a short while later, the switch was thrown and GB3WL came to life!
Fortunately, the RSGB General Manager, Graham Coomber G0NBI, happened to be passing by recently and was press-ganged into doing an ad-hoc “official” switch on!
RSGB General Manager, Graham G0NBI performs the un-“official” switch-on of GB3WL
We hope that this new 432MHz box will be well used, not only by members of Wythall Radio Club but by all amateurs across the wider Midlands. It provides better coverage of the M42 and M40 motorways on UHF than has been possible previously and even covers a large slice of Redditch.
It has been a long journey to get GB3WL on the air and we offer it to the Midlands community as a resource and another way to keep the 70cms airwaves humming.
More information on GB3WL can be found here.
With the festive season almost upon us, it’s time for Wythall Radio Club members to get into the party spirit – yes it’s the annual Christmas party once again!
Members bring copious amounts of food and we share a communal dinner together. Live entertainment and fun games will be going on too and with a fully licensed bar, there is no end to the fun we have!
Ever played “Stand-up Bingo”? Or maybe even rolling pound coins down the bowling alley to see if you can win a bottle of Scotch Whisky? There is a club raffle too and there may be some desirable radio-related goodies among the prizes this year so we hear!
You don’t have to pay to come either! Our equivalent of an admission fee is that you simply bring some food that we all might want to eat! There may be no RF at this event, but it proves that Wythall members do at least have some fun without RF sometimes…
It’s happening this Saturday 13th December anytime from 1900 in the Britannia Room at Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall B47 6LZ. Be prepared to have a little Christmas fun!
Terry 2E0XTV, Kevin 2E0KAQ, Howard 2E0KWH, Dawn 2E0MIS, Rob 2E0MEX, Anita 2E0DUO, Kev 2E0NCO & Steven 2E0SDD await their results!
Monday evening this week saw another milestone in Wythall Radio Club’s Training programme, when 8 students sat their Advanced License Examination.
With the class too large to fit in most of the usual meeting rooms at Wythall House, we had to book one of the larger suites in order to accommodate the sheer number of students, invigilators and the physical room required to separate them from each other in order to fulfil the regulations!
There is now a nervous wait for all eight of them. It takes a couple of weeks or so before the results come back, but if all goes well, we should be hearing a few new callsigns on the air around the area before Christmas.
Fingers toes and everything else crossed everyone…
Some good news on the D-STAR front. Wythall Radio Club member John M1JSS has been successful with an application for a public simplex gateway near his home in Bromsgrove. 
Called MB6IDG and operating on a frequency of 431.125 MHz, it will be based just outside the town centre near the village of Dodford.
Once it is up and running, it will be connected to the Worcestershire DCS Reflector 005H joining the Wythall Gateway MB6IWL and the increasing number of Dongle users around the area. It will also fill in D-STAR coverage for mobiles between Wythall and the Bewdley repeater.
There are also further tentative ideas for Wythall Radio Club to support an increase in D-STAR coverage towards Redditch and Evesham as well, but more about that when we have some firmer plans.
Meantime, keep your eyes on the ukrepeater site (or even MB6IDG’s page on this site) for news of the progress of the Bromsgrove Gateway.
