Andrew, G0RVM will be giving a talk on VHF Propagation this Wednesday evening (5th Oct) starting at 19:45 hours.
The talk will be an introduction to the most common modes of propagation at VHF and their use by radio amateurs.
The RSGB 2016 Convention will be held at the Kents Hill Conference centre in Milton Keynes again this year on the 8th and 9th October. It is a weekend of lectures spanning many topics of interest to all radio amateurs. The RSGB have now released a draft programme for Saturday and Sunday which I have included here.
If you are under 21yrs you get free entry too. 🙂
Peter, 2E0UAR and I, G0RVM are going. Are you?
A short SDR video from a Friedrichshafen 2016 lecture. In the video Phil Harman, VK6PH outlines different SDR architectures their associated benefits/dis-benefits and has a look at future use of CUDA instead of FPGAs.
Strange hot weather but good conditions on 2m 🙂
Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th September very busy on 2m. At times tonight every 10kHz step and often 5kHz step was busy. Great to see/hear. Worked F8IQS in Caen on CW. His signal was easily 599!
Even bumped into another club member, Steve, M6JJV working contest from Berkeley 🙂
Andrew
G0RVM
A problem we have experienced on several field days is that transmitted RF from a transmitter overpowers a nearby receiver despite it being on a different HF band or even on a more distant part of the spectrum.
Band pass filters are the usual approach to solving such an issue. However, another approach is to place a wide notch filter over the entire interfering transmission. This is the approach described by John Crowder, G0GDU in this article passed to me by Rex G4RAE last Wednesday.
Andrew
G0RVM
Tomorrow Andrew, G0RVM, is giving a talk on Software Defined Radio. It is a overview of the benefits of SDR when compared to our cherished black-box radio’s.
It is the first talk in a series that explores this exciting topic in increasing detail.
I’ve had a busy afternoon migrating this website from a server of my own to a hosting service funded by the club. Its taken a few hours as there where a few problems but it now seems to be working albeit a little more slowly. 🙂 If you do notice anything strange please drop me an email.
As part of the migration we can now have club email addresses. I have created role based ones for the committee (e.g. chairman @ tsgarc.uk etc) [remove the spaces] and can do so for any member requiring a club email address. If you would like one, please let me know.
Andrew
G0RVM
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to sit at your antenna and see what it ‘sees’? Well, this evening I attached a camera to my antenna and shot the following short video as the mast was raised and rotated.
The video starts with the antenna pointing at 45 degrees. Once elevated its rotated to the following directions where it stops momentarily: North, West, South, then back around to East, South, back to North then to 45 Degrees before the mst is finally lowered again.
What this little experiment shows is that the horizon looks pretty flat in all directions – no big hills evident. It also gives a good feel for how well the antenna clears the surrounding houses.
Andrew
G0RVM
The RSGB Convention takes place in Milton Keynes over the weekend of 8th and 9th October.
Not to be confused with a rally, the convention has lots of lectures on topics related to Amateur radio including DXpeditions and a construction competition.
Video’s of lectures, talks and events from previous years can mainly be found on Youtube or on the RSGB (Members only section) website where there is a Navassa Island video.
Hope to see you there,
Andrew
G0RVM
The 2nd of July was the date of the Thornbury Carnival and what a glorious day it was. Hot and sunny. Thanks to those who helped with the organisation, who provided equipment, who got equipment to/from the site and to those that manned our tent through the long day.
We where allocated a prominent position slightly down the hill from the entrance/exit so there were lots of people passing and quite a few stopped by to see us. Although the pitch was in a good position for passing traffic, it was in a very noisy position, not far from a music stage and had a children’s inflatable play ‘thing’ next door. The latter had an acoustically noisy generator running the whole day which, at times, made hearing the radio’s hard.
All-in tho, it was a good day. We handed-out many flyer’s advertising the club and had at least one person promise to come to the club. Jane and Sue did an excellent job at arresting our local Police, telling them about Amateur radio and getting a promise of a lecture….
The real test of success will be how many potential members come and see us over the next few weeks. But even if its none, I believe it a worthwhile exercise as it helped communicate Amateur radio to the general public, raise our profile within the community and has most likely secured us a talk.
Lashing a pole to an in-situ climbing frame and another to my truck we managed to get a dipole for 20m operational and made several contacts across Europe. We also had a short ‘white stick’ antenna for 2m and 70cms which allowed us to communicate with members not attending the site during the day. Peter assembled 10 x SDR radio kits to sell to interested visitors and sold 5, including 1 to Mark ;-).
Thanks again folks,
Andrew
G0RVM