wythall radio club

Tomorrow, December 27th, is a very important date in the life of Wythall Radio Club. It signifies a morning of “hunting the fox”!

A few of the “starters” at last year’s event

To radio enthusiasts, “Foxhunting” is nothing to do with horse & hound; it is all about trying to find a hidden radio transmitter (the “fox”), transmitting at short intervals every 10 minutes or so.

This is not therefore an activity that one needs an amateur licence for and so is an event that friends and relatives can (and do!) join in with.

In true Wythall tradition, it ends with lunch at a nearby pub and many tales will be told of how close people were to finding the “fox” first!

Last year saw the debut of the M0GJM Trophy in honour of the late Colin Truran M0GJM, (who sadly passed away last year). It was won by Steven 2E0SDD and Stacey M6STJ, who were very quick at “fox-finding”. We have heard that they are very keen to retain it for a further year. We shall see!

The members of Wythall Radio Club would like to wish all readers of (and visitors to) our website the best season’s greetings!

We wish all radio enthusiasts a fantastic Christmas holiday and our wishes that “Santa” has bought you all the radio equipment you could possibly want (and got it all down the chimney!!!) :-)

It’s been another great year at Wythall RC with our new 432MHz repeater at the centre of it. We look forward to building on our successes in the future.

Remember to check our Club Calendar page regularly – why not make it a New Year’s Resolution to come along to one of our Club events and say hello sometime?

73 es 88 from all the members of Wythall Radio Club

G0MTN presents the G7OJO Trophy to Stu M0NYP, overall winner of last year’s event

It is that special time of year again, when the airwaves around Wythall (and a bit further afield too!) will be full of stations exchanging numbers. No, it’s not a spy extravaganza, it’s just the Wythall Radio Club Christmas Contest again!

Lee G0MTN congratulates Jim 2E0BLP, last year’s winner of the 2m Trophy

Members are encouraged to work each other as often as possible between Christmas Eve at 20:00 and New Year’s Day at 20:00.

The rules are a little difficult to explain here but suffice it to say that at the end of the event, we take our best 5 days scores and submit them to the adjudicators. They then come up with the results, which are celebrated with a presentation evening in January.

It is all about “having fun with RF” as our club motto states, and it invariably lives up to its name.

So if you hear strange goings-on on the airwaves (especially on 145.225 MHz FM or perhaps even on our new repeater GB3WL) over the Christmas holidays, don’t be alarmed – in fact, please join in and say “hello”.

Once again, Wythall Radio Club has done brilliantly in the annual 1.8MHz RSGB Club Calls Contest.

Mark M0RKX operates G0WRC out portable in this year’s Club Calls Contest

This year’s contest took place last month and the results have just appeared on the RSGB Contest website.

Congratulations to our Club Station GX4WAC which finished 3rd in the individual places out of the 99 stations taking part. The team, comprising Lee G0MTN, Stan G4JGV and Anita 2E0DUO, scooped 5171 points just 453 points off the top spot.

In the club rankings, Wythall again finished in 3rd place (out of 49 Clubs) with our team of GX4WAC, G3YXM, G0WRC who were out portable and G7DDN. With the top two spots in the contest taken by “serious” Contest Groups, that makes Wythall Radio Club the top “ordinary” club in the listings.

Even better arguably, our ‘B’ team, comprising Simon G4TVR, Chris G0EYO, Rob 2E0MEX and David G0ICJ finished in an incredible 8th place, beating many club’s A teams!

Well done to everyone who took part. Perhaps next year we might even catch those Contest Groups up!

Is this an effective HF antenna? ;-)

Antennas are the lifeblood of the active Radio enthusiast. At Wythall Radio Club, we are only too well aware of that, having replaced our main tower antennas earlier this year!

So when a visiting speaker with expert knowledge comes to do a presentation on the subject, you can guarantee there will be a full house!

This Tuesday, friend of the club Mark G4FPH, a broadcast professional, will be presenting “Effective HF Antennas”.

Mark is well known to us at Wythall for previous talks and for getting his hands dirty with us at some of our special events. He is a very welcome visitor!

We know from previous evenings with Mark that we will be in for a very informative and challenging evening. As Wythall members are known for taking new ideas on board, we fully expect to hear about members trying out some of Mark’s ideas in 2015!

Why not join us for the evening? The talk starts tomorrow night (16th December) at 20:30 in the Darts Room at Wythall House, Silver Street, Wythall B47 6LZ. Visitors are most welcome.

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.