August, so far, has been a very busy month, with some great weather, up to the point of our towns yearly Air show Airbourne 2015. (Hence the spitfire above in this months site banner)
Today the skies opened up and our town had one its largest deluges for some time with flooding throughout. However yesterdays trip up to our shack on the hill was in brilliant sunshine on a very warm day.
We are have starting our training sessions again as you will see in one of the pictures below and Barry G8DXU, over the last couple of weeks has brought along with him some very impressive test equipment, for all those that visit our site to see and to get an idea of what these pieces of technical kit do.
After a VERY busy BBQ, we still had some food and drink left over so its been food central up on the hill. There is also more diversity on the modes, now we have some HF antennas rigged up on the site.
Our club wishes to thank Barry G8DXU for putting a great deal of his valuable time and effort into the running of our Beachy Head shack, as well as Tony G3ZQB (our chairman) and Johns G4JHD wife Sylviane for cooking up a 5 star BBQ with all the trimmings and of course all those members that support our club outside events and inside events down at our new club rooms.
Seen below: John G4JHD, Tony G3ZQB, Anthony, Barry G8DXU, Richard M6EYO and Andy M6GND. Euan the societies youngest member is seen here demonstrating adjustment of the length of a VHF Dipole for minimum VSWR. This was one of the final elements (no pun intended!) of his Foundation Licence Practical.
Seen below. Same again with Andy M6GND taking the photo.
Seen below. A packed out radio cabin with some club members out of the shot.
Seen below, Test equipment brought along by Barry G8DXU and a big thanks goes out to all those that load up the vehicles with all manner of radio equipment to bring along for the day and demonstrate to others.
The equipment above was used to answer a question from Richard M6EYO about the performance of Baofeng Tranceivers. “How do they compare to ICOM / YAESU Handhelds etc.” We checked Transmitter spectral purity with a 1000MHz Spectrum Analyser. All Harmonics typically better than -50dB down. Receiver sensitivity tested with Marconi 2955B were better than 0.3uV However selectivity in the presence of signals 12.5kHz from wanted channel? Simple SDR has its limitations!! Definitive measurement results will be posted on this site at some later stage.
Keep checking back for more updates and if you are the pilot of that spitfire who did a special fly over of our radio site, drop us line and say hello.
If you are interested in joining a hobby that has been at the root of most of the technology of today, with radio hams using the equivalent of mobile phones back in the 60’s, please drop us a line more info on our club.