wythall radio club

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…

Further to the news below about our 5 recent Foundation Licence successes, the new Wythall Radio Club Members’ callsigns are beginning to appear on the air!

Our congratulations go to Andy Brown M6CYY and Andy Warner M6CYZ (some collusion there perhaps? :-))

Also to George Ifrim, (our first Roumanian Member!) now M6LTE and Kevin Tonge who has chosen M6NCO. Kevin has a proud Dad in Jim 2E0BLP who is a long-standing and valued senior member of Wythall Radio Club.

Finally John Daws’ new callsign is confirmed as M6KET.

Exciting times!

Dawn proudly shows off her Foundation exam pass certificate

More great news from the Training camp at Wythall Radio Club!

Dawn, wife of club member John M1JSS, has this evening taken her Foundation Exam and passed first time. So yet another spouse joins the happy throng of lady members of Wythall Radio Club. In fact, several members’ wives have passed the Foundation Exam in recent years and there is now quite a large group of “XYLs” (as radio folk tend to call them) amassing in the Club!

All the members of Wythall Radio Club send their congratulations to Dawn and are also keeping their fingers crossed for Mark 2E0MSE – he took his Advanced Exam tonight at the same time. Sadly the results for that take a little while to come through so we are all waiting on tenterhooks for that one!

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.

Andy, John, Kevin, Andy and George showing off their pass certificates this evening at the club

Nothing to do with Enid Blyton of course but Wythall Radio Club’s own Famous Five. The bunch of lads pictured here are the latest additions to the great hobby of Amateur Radio.

Tonight, Andy Brown, John Daws, Kevin Tonge, Andy Warner and Roumanian-born George Ifrim all passed their Foundation Licence Exams after tuition from Wythall Radio Club’s top team of tutors, led by Senior Training Co-ordinator, Chris G0EYO. Another brilliant set of results and the members of Wythall Radio Club congratulate you and look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at club meetings in the future. Well done boys!

Their new callsigns will be posted here in an update later this week, just as soon as we hear what they are.

That’s not the end of the training news either, as next week we have other members taking both Foundation and Advanced exams at the same time – watch this space!

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

WAB members manning a promotional stall at a recent radio fair

The hobby of Amateur Radio has spawned a number of operating awards over the years; Worked All Continents and Worked All States are two examples, but there is a Worked All Britain!

WAB, as it is known, was devised by John Morris G3ABG back in 1969. It was started to promote an interest in the Amateur Radio hobby in Britain and to sponsor a series of awards based on the geography of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

WAB award chasing can almost become a hobby in its own right! Radio enthusiasts will travel to remote parts of the country just to activate rare “squares” based on National Grid references.

After experiencing a heyday in the 1970’s and 80’s, WAB is making a comeback in the UK and more and more stations can be heard on air activating squares and joining in WAB sponsored events and contests.

This Tuesday at Wythall Radio Club, two of the leading members of the WAB movement in Great Britain are visiting us to explain just what is behind this resurgence. Husband and wife team, Judith G4IAQ and Dave G4IAR will be presenting a talk in the Darts Room in Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall B47 6LZ.

Visitors, as always are welcome. The presentation starts at 2030.

Wythall Radio Club has been going Morse Mad this May!

Lee G0MTN (adjudicator) with John and Certificate

In honour of our late president, Lew Williams, who coached many senior members through the old 12 words per minute Morse test, we nominated each May as a month in which members can make a special effort to improve their code skills. We award a shield to the person who in the adjudicator’s opinion has shown the most progress. It is not a competition, more of a nomination for progress. This Tuesday the results of the 2013 award were announced.

Alf G1MJO and his certificate with Lee G0MTN

Two certificates of merit were awarded before the “Lew Williams Shield” was presented; John (no call-sign yet!) joined our club Morse class during 2013 as a precursor to getting a licence. His progress has been phenomenal and when he passes his license later this month, he will be Wythall Radio Club’s first ever Foundation Licensee to make his debut on air on CW!

Alf G1MJO is in his late 80s and never passed the old Morse test but has shown real stick-ability and persistence, even appearing on air and taking some faster Morse sent by other members with a very high level of accuracy.

John G4OJL, proud winner of the Lew Williams Shield for 2013

The main award however went to John G4OJL who was a founder member of the club in the early 1980’s. He rejoined us last autumn, having never used CW on air, indeed he was not on air for nearly 30 years! Returning to the club, he found a new love for radio and especially learning the code and has spent every day (bar one!) since last autumn doing 30 minutes of practice a day! Now he is exclusively a Morse Man on HF.

Tuesday was a very moving evening for those present. We trust the pictures give you a flavour of what it was like to be there!

Whenever there is a little hiatus in the posts on the Wythall Radio Club website, it is usually because there is something going on!

This time it has been holiday time! Quite a few members have been away from the Midlands enjoying the unseasonably sunny weather we have recently been experiencing in the UK.

G0EYO was spotted in Wales; G7DDN has been heard on CW from South Devon; 2E0BLP has been fishing in Warwick and making contacts in his spare time; G3YXM has been in Scotland and Chairman Mike G4VPD has been working back to club members from Spain on 14MHz with his little Elecraft KX3. And there are others who have been away from home too.

So just because the website has been quiet, it doesn’t mean Wythall Radio Club members aren’t still “having fun with RF”!

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!