Endeavouring to learn CW
Before the other 2 admins (Peter M3PHP & James MØBOV) blog about it, I am going to mention first.
We have setup a forum for all aspects of Amateur Radio at www.hamradioforum.net
It’s free to join and although only a few days old membership is growing with Amateurs from UK, USA, Scandinavia and more.
We are open to suggestion about needed sections and adding some extra features soon to improve how it works, but will mainly be a forum.
So point your browser over to the forum and get involved.
Tonight after local net had finished I went up to 432MHz to work a few station in the 432MHz UKAC contests.
Operated for about 40 minutes and worked 6 stations. Not mega numbers, but I gave a few points away and as I only ran 20w and that was into a vertical I am not upset with results.
Was more to give me something to do than watch TV all evening.
QSOs = 6
Mults = 2
Longest distance = 44km
Total Score = 202 points
More info on RSGB VHF/UHF contests available at www.vhfcc.org
Plan for future:-
Buy 70cm Beam & Rotator. Install in Loft with 2m ZL Beam.
As usual I attended the Kempton Park Radio Rally on 4th November. It was an early start for me as the person who was giving me a lift had to leave at 04:45am. Ouch.
So alarms were set and I woke up an hour early thinking I may have missed alarm and could get back to sleep. Instead I played a couple of games of bejeweled with my friend JW on MSN.
We arrived at Kempton about 5:30 and I helped set the tables with the info displaying where the vendors and clubs would be.
After 6am one of the big Vendors arrived with their Transit stuffed full of Amateur Radio items to sell. I helped them un-pack as I normally do and then other traders and clubs started turning up. After the 2nd large vendor was unpacked with my assistance I went to our clubs tables and added my 2 items with prices. I put up for sale my Icom IC-E90 handheld radio and my Squeezebox wireless music player.
At 10am the punters were let in to spend their hard earned cash and I was busily checking that everyone had a ticket. When someone could cover the door I went and brought 2 copies of the RSGB Prefix guide (one for M0BOV) and went back to keep on checking the tickets.
A while later I had a call on the radio that someone was interested in my radio. The person was tempted and the haggling began. Eventually we settled on a price and the sale was made.
Time for some more shopping. As I had helped one of the vendors I got a good price on some items. Alas the music player was unsold and when I arrived home was unpacked and back in old position.
Items Purchased
All in all apart from being knackered when I got home was another great day. And the M0TZO shack is getting better.
Over the weekend of 27-28th October 2007 I was at the Whitton Amateur Radio Group for the CQ Worldwide 2007 Phone Contest. I was actually there from 6pm Friday night until about 1am Monday morning.
This contest we had a more organised feel and early on we could see that we were doing better than we did in 2006. But this could also be due to running as a Multi-2 station when in 2006 we operated as Multi-Single.
We still had 2 radios, but the 2nd station could operate anything, not just multipliers and could call CQ as well.
We had a set schedule for operators and this was filled out more than 2006.
Like 2006 we had some guest operators. Vlad UA9FAR did a remarkably well. So how did the club do???
| Year | QSO’s | Points | Countries | Zones | Score |
| 2007 Details | 3183 | 4340 | 424 | 96 | 1,326,274 |
| 2006 Details | 1738 | 2589 | 379 | 93 | 1,222,008 |
| 2005 Details | 1634 | 2852 | 347 | 92 | 1,252,028 |
| 2002 Details (Crawley) |
2718 | 5149 | 349 | 92 | 2,270,709 |
Bold equals Best score in that category