TSAGRC will be running a event along side the 1st Sedbury & Tidenham
Scout Group on Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th October.
The special event call sign will be GB2SAT. QRZ.com page.
JOTA ID: 5GB71J Maidenhead Locator: IO81QQ Worked All Britain Square: ST59
We will be running HF, VHF stations along with other things to spark an interest in radio and electronics. The activities will be aligned so the Scouts can gain the
Communicator Badge.
Thornbury and South Gloucestershire Amateur Radio Club were once again allowed to operate for Railways on the Air at the Vale of Berkeley Railway on Saturday 21st September 2019.
Railways on the Air (ROTA) usually takes place on the weekend closest to the 27th September. This date celebrates the anniversary of the first steam powered passenger railway which took place on the 27th September 1825. The first passenger train ran on a line in the North East of England from Darlington to Stockton.
A number of amateur radio stations operate from heritage railways throughout the country with the aim of contacting as many other stations as possible as well as any other radio amateurs who may be interested. TSGARC managed to contact 13 other railway sites from Helston in the south to Dufftown in the north.
We also managed to contact 2 other special event sations. One was celebrating the 100th anniversary of the KLM airline and the other was celebrating the 101st anniversary of the first Marconi wireless message from North Wales to Australia.
In total we managed 69 contacts in 10 countries including Italy and Slovenia. We were very pleased with the results of our day and would like to thank the members and trustees of the railway who put up with us for the day.
See Vale of Berkeley Railway Website for more information on the railway where the special event station was held.
Thanks also to Ron for the information.
Members of TSGARC at Vale Of Berkeley Railway. GB4VBR station up and running and abut 30 contacts made by 13:00 local time. These include both HF & VHF bands.
The Thornbury & South Gloucestershire Amateur Radio Club will hold its annual general meeting on Wednesday 3rd of April 2019.
The timings will be 19:30 for 20:00 start.
Agenda:
Well since John (M0HFH) posted in November on Smiths Charts and Mathematical Matching things have been moving on.
There have been a couple of component builds. Some frustration, but a steady stream of improvements and knowledge gained.
John (M0HFH) will be leading a talk, see programme for when, on what has been happening so I do not want to spoil the night by giving to much away now.
Due to a hardware issue on the earlier event we are running it again on September 12th 2018.
As before the Fox will be Paul M0ZMB and he will hide somewhere around Thornbury.
He will call in on 145.500 and then move to another frequency. It is hoped to be 145.4125, if it is available.
He will transmit for 2mins every 10mins.
Tonight is the clubs annual pedestrian foxhunt around Thornbury.
I will probably start from the Rock Street Car Park as it is slightly raised to find Paul M0ZMB the fox..
I am also going to have APRS running to se where I go and what transmission is like around Thornbury.
The mobile foxhunt was held on a glourious evening. The fox this year was Paul M0ZMB. There were four teams out looking for him. All the teams chose the same high point on the A38 to get the first direction.
As the my team was created from the guys who went to the Chantry we were the last of the teams to arrive at the high ground to get the first bearing. The first team were leaving when we arrived, the other two teams were still getting their bearings. We only managed to get a quick bearing before the first transmission finished.
Mark (M0RZS) was using a homebrew loop into a hand held, Roger (2E0FPV) was using a handheld and the body shielding to attenuate the signal and I was driving and drawing on the map. The car also had a mobile unit so we could monitor to ensure we did not miss a transmision from the fox.
The teams that left at the same time as us went in the opposite direction. Our second bearing was slightly off where the fox was hidden, so when we got to our third point we were expecting the bearing to be approximately due South to cross over where two previous bearings crossed. It crossed the first bearing line but further to the West.
We took our fourth bearing from outside the church at Cowhill. Even though the fox was reducing power by now the only way we could get a reduction in signal strength was to loose height. This was achieved by Roger (2E0FPV) putting his hand held on the floor and shielding the antenna. Mark (M0RZS) had to use the hill to get some attenuation but had strong signals all around.
To get to the church we had driven past the fox. So we had to turn around and found the fox in the Anchor car park.
I hope all the other teams had a good night as we did. Thanks to Mark (M0RZS) and Roger (2E0FPV) for the team work and company. Thanks to Paul (M0ZMB) for being the fox.
The picture shows the bearing traces made.
Traces on the map.
Paul M0ZMB ran a beginners night with Arduino. This included what is involved in the Arduino ecosystem and how to get started.
The Arduino
Is an open source computer hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control objects in the physical world.
The Arduino project started in 2003 as a program for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, aiming to provide a low-cost and easy way for novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators.
Since it was started it has grown with other people adding in new things including controller boards and sensor/device boards called shields.
Paul’s bag of tricks.
Paul had been tinkering with the Arduino for a while and previously gave a talk on some of his projects that he had created. From this Paul was asked to create a kit of bits to introduce the basics of what could be done. He created a bag of bits including the NodeMCU controller, a small OLED display, resistors, LED’s, jumper leads, switches and breadboard. All members had to provide was a laptop to run the programming software.
To start with the members had to install the IDE to be able to programme the device. It also had to be updated to enable the controller that Paul chose. After this we were able to create our first programme called a sketch. This was to blink an LED built on to the controller board. Then finally to blink an external LED, using the bits in the bag.
Paul has created a few more projects to do with increasing complexity.
The time for the evening ran out, with everyone enjoying the evening.
John M0HFH is already think about things he might try and do with the Arduino family!
So this is most definitely to be continued…………….
Tonight was the mobile foxhunt. Peter (2E0UAR) was the fox.
Paul (M0ZMB) was first to find him
There were five teams out looking for the fox, of which four found him eventually. The last two to find did have to rely on some big clues from Peter to his location.
The fox was hidden at the bottom point of the small blue triangle to the right of the picture below.
Total distance travelled about 30miles. As you can see some of us went a bit further afield, even though we only started about a mile or so from the foxes den. The fox was well hidden.
Thanks to Peter (2E0UAR) for being the fox.
The route for the mobile foxhunt 2017