MBARS Newsreel

Well the Christmas party is out of the way for another year, and with a bigger turn out than last year too. There are a few pictures on the gallery of the festivities too. Remember over the dull days of the christmas breaks the VHF open contests and more going on.

Thank you to Martin Taylor (M0LCY) and Family for pulling the whole meal together and making it a splendid evening.

I am also sure I speak for everyone at the club wishing our three candidates luck in their foundation licence exams on tuesday the 14th Dec and hopefully the nice man from ofcom will bring them all nice new shiny callsigns.

73's For Now

Martin Hazel

M0ZIF

Harry Leeming had promiced to talk to the Radio Club about Radio Repairs. The night was Dark and very very wet, the North West was plagued by serious floods, gale force winds and more, but still we had a decent attendance. Harry kept us all enthralled for longer than normal !! which is a major achievement. With Melted valves and shop stories of gross stupidity to poor olde rigs that we, the radio ham community have destroyed whilst not thinking.

There are a few pictures in te gallery to have a look over, and Harry kindly left a list of spares and parts he has for sale if anyone wants a copy please email Martin M0ZIF

M0ZIF, would like to propose a Wine and Cheese discussion group, to discuss radio. Any takers?

It would be nice for the Club to do more other than the occassional Beer and the rare Radio... So what about setting up a study group, researching the effects of terrain on VHF signals?

Including

• The Effects of Height
• The Effects of Water proximity
• Baying and Stacking (pro's and cons)
• Azimuth effects
• Feeder antenna's

Would people be interested in this? It would of course involve some fieldwork including Glasson Dock and Jubilee Tower as well as a little light SOTA work.

If your interested please email Martin M0ZIF

After a great result on the 144qrp challenge, but being beaten by the Warrington Contest Group, Practical Wireless (DEC 09, P19) has a picture of the tower they used for both the 2m and 4m contests. Now clearly, M0ZIF did say we needed higher antennas next year. M0ZIF is thinking about buying another 25' of swagged mast, and the extra guying mateials required. This would lead to the issue of rotation, and clearly we would need to source a rotator and controller.

Power for next year is not going to be an issue as we have the new generator, a few batteries, this should run both the TS2000 and the laptop for logging. I have also spoken to the authors of EI5FI (Paul) will help I am sure. The advantage with WinTest is that it will allow us to spot the gridsquares visually.

M0ZIF's final thought on this is when we Call CQ in a contest we need to exchange the TIME also it is probably down to this that we lost points last year.