Today Phil G8XTW and Matt G4IYT visited the GB3TV TV repeater site to perform a number of tasks. First on the list was to work out why the repeater had suddenly died. Fortunately it was a simple mains power issue which was easily rectified, and once the repeater had started we received reports that it was operating normally.
WiFi The second job was to conduct a WiFi site survey and test the 2.
Tonight we had a portable station show-and-tell evening with a number of members putting on portable stations. At one point we had 4 stations operating across 60m (Clive G4ENB), 40m (Matt G4IYT), 20m (Alex 2E0KUD), and 2m (Mark G6WRB)!
Of particular interest was Mark G6WRB’s 2m station mounted on a door nicked from his daughter’s wardrobe. Hopefully she will forgive him when she finds out about all the VHF DX he has managed to work!
This evening we were pleased to host Tim G1HBC who talked about his experience building Slim Jim antennas for 2m, 70cm, and 1090Mhz bands. The latter was put to effective use tracking aircraft and was demonstrated to outperform a more expensive commerical setup!
Tim discussed a variety of construction techniques and shared his valuable insights in to how to build and tune an often underrated antenna.
The talk was recorded by Alex 2E0KUD and is available to view on his Youtube channel.
The Bootsale 2025 Booking Form is now available for pre-booking trading pitches. Please note that bookings must be received before 1st May 2025, and pre-booked tickets will be sent out during the week of 5th May 2025.
Please visit our dedicated pages for visitors or traders to find more information on the event.
The DDRC committee are pleased to announce that we have agreed 18th May 2025 as the date for our annual bootsale event.
Please visit our dedicated pages for visitors or traders to find more information on the event.
Tonight we held our first construction evening of the year, with a number of new and regular members working on CW decoders as well as 49er 3W CW transceivers for the 40m band. Some pictures from the night are shown below.
While good progress was made on several builds, we’ll use our second meeting of the month to finish them and conduct some testing.
Tonight’s activity was a talk at the Scout Hut on DX Propagation tools presented by Alex 2E0KUD. Alex started with a refresher on the mechanics of HF propagation before entering a deep dive on how to interpret the popular N0NBH Solar Data report, well known in the hobby for its concise display of propagation conditions. Along the way we looked at the effects of the solar wind, X-Ray radiation, sunspots, and the interplanetary magnetic field.
Tonight saw our first talk of the new year with “Introduction to Antenna Modelling” by Matt G4IYT. Matt demonstrated the basics of MMANA-GAL showing how to model basic dipole, end fed, and vertical antennas.
The discussion also included examples of real-world antenna installations (the Inverted-L over his house!) as well as some trickier examples such as base loaded verticals, yagis, and trapped dipoles.
The talk was well received by members and the club thanked Matt for his efforts with a healthy round of applause.