A warm welcome awaits all visitors and prospective members at our club meetings. Absolute beginners and experienced amateurs will find all the help and advice they need. Our membership has a wide variety of knowledge and experience and includes several electronics professionals. The club is well organised and offers a programme of technical and not so technical lectures, talks and demonstrations and offer simple construction projects for the newcomer and experienced alike. We are also very well equipped for outside events, including special event stations and rallies.
Dunstable Downs Radio Club is a flourishing, pro-active and successful club always on the look out for new members, so if you are interested in radio of any type come and pay us a visit.
We also operate a voice repeater on 70cm and amateur television repeaters locally on 23cm and 13cm.
Want to listen to HF but have not got a HF receiver? Use the web! Try University of Twente’s Wide-band WebSDR. For a list of other receivers click see WebSDR.org.
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.