wythall radio club

Despite the extreme temperatures, Wythall Radio Club members have been having fun – indoors as well as (ocassionally) outside!

Here’s one of our DX members Kev G4XLO operating /P from above the Devon coast.

And David G7IBO, Pete M5DUO and Ian M0LQY are on the lawn outside Wythall House  testing a vertical.

When setting up the Club’s rigs, members sometimes ask: “Where does this plug go?”

To answer that question, we ran a hands-on session about using the Club’s HF rig and doublet on SSB and FT8. 

This gave Roger – who received his M7XRH call earlier in the day – a chance to get on-air.  His 25 watts of FT8 on 40m was spotted in New Zealand – not bad!

The GB3WL repeater team of Derek G1INC and colleagues has been active adding Echolink and AllStar to the menu of access points and modes.

Meanwhile, Neil G1TZC has been promoting 2m SSTV with a talk at West Manchester Radio Club.  He reports: 

“Everyone seemed to enjoy the talk and the walk through on how to get on air and use their  local SSTV repeater – MB7TX.  15 beermats [3D printed by Neil] were taken away with the repeater’s call sign, frequency and tone burst details.  A lot of keen operators are wanting to support their new repeater.”

We are now working on a project to display live frames received by our SSTV repeater MB7TW.  So if you transmit into the repeater, you’ll be able to see the picture quality that’s received.

Watch this space!

The tall masts at Droitwich are going out of commission.

For many years they have been used to transmit BBC Long Wave.

But the transmitters at Droitwich in Worcestershire, Westerglen near Stirling and Burghead overlooking the Moray Firth, cease at 00:00 UTC on Saturday 27 June 2026.

To commemorate the event, a special event station GB1500M (fifteen hundred meters – the long wave frequency) has been on the ait during the last week of transmission, operated by various radio amateurs across the UK.

Farewell to our tall neighbours!

PS listen out for  Club member Nigel G1BXL who has one of the special call signs . GB1500M

See Wythall Radio Club members operating via satellite and short wave radio at Transport Museum Wythall.

Saturday 20th June between 10.30 and mid afternoon.

We will be celebrating International Museums on the Air , contacting other radio hams around the world.

Visitors of all ages are welcome. 

Find us on the grass area by the Museum car park.

This is FREE – you only need to pay if you go beyond us into the Museum itself.

• Find out how we use satellite to communicate over long distances – better than wi-fi!
• Try your hand at sending Morse Code – and get a Certificate!
• See how we use data mode technology – computer linked to radio transmitter/receiver
• Say “hello” to radio hams that we contact – operate radios if you have a licence
• Learn about the various antenna that we will be demonstrating
• Or just have a chat!

We’ll be using our special call-sign GB0BUS –

to celebrate the Transport Museum’s collection of historical buses.

70cm handies and Club handheld yagis at the ready next Tuesday 2nd June.

It’s the annual Wythall Radio Club ‘find the hidden transmitter’ evening in Wythall Park – 7.30 for 7.45 pm by the Tennis Courts.

Bring a 70cm hand-held and an antenna adapter to take the PL259 plugs on the yagis.

Expect lots of fun trying to be the first to find the transmitter. 

And chat afterwards in the bar of Wythall House.

Visitors welcome to participate or observe!

Some previous years events can be found here.

2025

2024

We’ll be continuing to build the excellent LARC 40m kits this Tuesday 19th May.

Come and see the Club in action!

Six members are building these SSB/CW transceiver kits as a Club project.

And on Tuesday John M6KET has donated his so anyone can have a go at building part of it.

Just the job for a little refresher or first time soldering and coil winding – there will be expert helpers on hand to advise where necessary!

A working LARC radio will be available as a guide (see photo).

The LARC sets have few components to solder in place and only a couple of torroids to wind.  Great for first-time builders.

Wythall House Darts Room from from 8pm on Tuesday – visitors welcome!

You can see behind the scenes of a solo dxpedition at Wythall Radio Club next Tuesday 7th April at 8pm. 

Visitors are very welcome.

Jamie M0SDV will be talking about his visit to Grenada island as J38W where he made an average of over 1,000 qsos a day. 

The talk will cover the planning and equipment used for this solo dxpedition as well as the operating and day-to-day issues when using this new location. 

Jamie has just returned from 2 weeks operating with the S21WD group in Bangladesh, so this will make an interesting comparison.

The session will be in the Darts Room, Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall – there is a location map here.

alacarte, SAMBA – these may sound like they belong at a dinner dance…..

Instead, they are part of the world of the Raspberry Pi (RPi) – and material we covered in Wythall Radio Club’s recent 3 evening course.

Over 20 members and visitors packed out the Darts Room, our base at Wythall House. 

Ian M0LQY (photo) took us from first steps with a RPi through networking with a Windows PC to connecting the Pi to manage our radios.

In the final week Ian gave us a live demo of how to compile software, using popular digital mode programmes as examples.

There were lots of questions and discussion, and some attendees brought along radio applications they were using with their RPi.

From discussions in the bar afterwards, it was clear that once you have one Pi it is never enough!  Some owners had 4 or 5!

Many thanks to Ian for an excellent and accessible series of talks, giving us the basis for lots of computing experimentation to fill the time as we head into the summer duldrums on HF!

High pressure and early mist – maybe there will be some enhancement on 50MHz and 144MHz today?

So at Wythall Radio Club’s ‘Third Friday Club’ we plugged in a FT857 and connected the 6 and 2 beams. 

Nothing doing on SSB so we added the Signalink to see if there was any FT8 activity.

Lots of PSKreporter spots on 6m, with +1db from Sweden and -9db from Denmark – nice!

But enhancement seemed very sporadic as we only managed digital QSOs with Nick M1DDD/P in Derbyshire on 6m and Steve G1PYT in Stourbridge on 2m.

Many thanks to Steve and Nick for coming on with such a quiet band.

So always CQ on a quiet band – you never know who might be listening!

Let’s see who we can work at our April ‘Third Friday’ event.