wythall radio club

This time last year we had strong winds and lashing rain for Wythall Radio Club’s annual activation at the  Transport Museum Wythall.   The weather was so bad that two of the gazebos on site were damaged by strong gusts. 

So as you can imagine, when last Saturday’s forecast was for storms we weren’t impressed.  Fortunately we only had over-night rain and a day of sunshine and breezes!

All the prep work was done on the Friday.  Simon G4TVR kindly supplied his van to move all the gear the mile from our club room. 

Dave G3YXM – who usually catapults a halyard over a tree branch – was in GM-land, but luckily Simon has an arboreal catapult (photo below).  This monster lauched a line attached to our OCFD over the top of 15m high trees.  This ended up with it being even higher than last year.

Ian decided to try locating the HF vertical on the other side of the trees and directly at the end of the wire antenna.  We lashed it firmly to a wooden fence with bungy cord. 

On the previous visit there had been huge issues with the HF stations interfering with each other.  The new positions seemed to resolve this issue.

We all turned up on the Saturday, from 8.30am to put the radio equipment in position, for the general public to start arriving at 10.30am for the Transport Museum open day where there was a visiting fleet of green London Transport buses.

As usual there were one or two snags.  We had tested the 2 HF antennas on the Friday, but on Saturday the OCFD antenna had very high SWR indicating open circuit. 

Swapping coax feeder didn’t solve the problem.  Using Phil 2E0WTH’s RigExpert analyser and Ian M0LQY’s homebrew dummy load, we checked the rig and cables.  Finally we traced the fault to the short piece of coax supplied with the antenna and containing several ferrites. 

Removing this and connecting our coax feeder direct to the antenna solved the problem – and didn’t cause any new ones with RF on the feeder.

So all was well.

In total, five stations were run on the day.  These were split between HF, VHF and satellite. 

On HF, we had separate FT8 and CW/SSB stations.  Conditions were very poor and the CW/SSB station struggled to make contacts. 

But by early afternoon 40m was open for inter-G and we had a couple of pile-ups on SSB.  Many thanks to all the stations who called in.  

The audio from the CW/SSB station was piped through a small PA, and attracted a number of visitors – including some current and prospective radio amateurs.  It competed well against the noise of passing buses and the model steam train whistle! 

Some visitors tried our CW demo kit, and were awarded certificates for sending their names.

Neil G1TZC brought his portable, solar-powered QO100 satellite station.  A highlight was working Garry ZD7GWM – a DX member of our Club – via QO100.  Several members took the opportunity to have a chat.  

The team comprised: John 2E0XET, Phil 2E0WTH, Winston 2E0EGP, Simon G4TVR, David G7IBO, Gary G5RGS, Ian M0LQY, Neil G1TZC and Chris G3YHF. 

Come 3.30pm, we quickly dismanted the stations and everything was back in the Club room by 4.30.

The great thing about these days out is that you get to experiment in the real world to see if your station does what you want it to do.