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Today I get to tell you all about something I've been working on in the background for a few weeks now, and I'm extremely excited that this day has finally come.
Mid Sussex Amateur Radio Society is going to get a full-blown professional online training academy.
Various parts of the jigsaw have been coming together in the last few days, and now I can start to imagine what it's going to look like and how it might work.
I make no apologies for thanking several people as part of this announcement, and I must start with the person who has made it possible, and that is Jon Hudson of SDRplay - a man known by some of you and by the wider amateur community as someone who has done so much to stimulate and support innovation and education in the field of radio communications.
Jon has very kindly given us access to a full training course, including all the individual educational elements required to deliver it. More detail will follow on exactly what it covers, but it's a modern course teaching modern radio practice and technology.
It's the first course that will be offered on a new MSARS platform, and I'll be rolling it out in stages - firstly to my ever helpful and willing friends Chris M7VJE and Merv M0WVE. They have volunteered to walk through the course as guinea-pig students to see how it teaches and how best to deliver and tailor it for the future.
The first part is down to me however, and that's the physical building of the new training environment. As part of that, I'm also very pleased to tell you that our web-hosting provider, an unsung and valuable friend to the society, has once again donated server resources to support an entirely new Learning Management System known as Moodle. Thank you sir.
Some of you may already be familiar with this system. It's widely used by schools and universities worldwide. It's a beast of a package and contains all the elements required to deliver first-class training programmes, though the learning curve for me is huge and it will take me some time to get to grips with it.
The LMS is already up and running on the MSARS webserver, and is being configured as we speak. This won't be a quick process however, and the phase after that will be the loading of the new course material - also a time consuming effort.
So a very sincere thanks to Chris and Merv for helping me out with finessing the course delivery side of things. It's no small undertaking, and I couldn't do this without their help. It'll be a lot of fun though, and we can run it in a flexible, bite-sized on-demand manner, as the course itself is an 11 week affair consisting of 11 one-hour 'lessons'.
Once everything has been properly bedded-in (and I suspect that this won't be until early 2023) I'm going to roll the programme out to a much wider audience.
That will involve me in actually teaching and supporting the course, though I'm hoping that some of you will be willing to help out with some ad-hoc student support on the in-built Moodle forums from time to time.
Once the platform itself is in place and tested, any course can be hosted on it. In the future, we can create introductory courses, RSGB-style courses and informal, lightweight one-hour courses on any topic - whatever we want. That's a lot of work, and probably enough to keep me busy for a couple of years, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.
Berni M0XYF
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Phil G4UDU this morning posted a link to a tremendously useful Web resource called sigidwiki.com.
Translated back into English from Nerdish, this is a radio signal identification Wiki, something I'm sure all of us would potentially be interested in. We know that a Wiki is an online information resource built and maintained by its own user base, and so it's usually up to date and accurate because the curators are often passionate if not fanatical about managing certain information for the wider community.
This particular site is clearly dedicated to identifying radio signals of all types, and the Wiki is well organised by both frequency range and usage type.
I'll let you go and have a play with it, but it really doesn't take very long to (for example) identify the horrible Russian Over The Horizon radar signals currently splattering roughshod over not just our amateur bands, but all HF frequency ranges, without regard for any other spectrum users.
Usefully, you get to see a sample of what the signals look like on your spectrum waterfall, and also hear an audio sample. The audio is surprisingly helpful in differentiating similar-looking signals, often highlighting differences that are not immediately visually discernible.
Here you can see the entry for the 29B6 Russian 'Kontayner' radar:
https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/29B6_%27Kontayner%27_OTH_Radar
which looks quite similar to the UK's very own PLUTO II OTH radar (based in Cyprus):
https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/PLUTO_II_OTH_Radar
but you can clearly hear the difference. For political balance, it has to be said that it doesn't take much to find an awful lot of PLUTO II activity up and down the bands at the moment either, for obvious reasons I guess.
Military radar aside, there is an amazing collection of signal data in this database, so next time you see something unusual on the bands, why not screen grab it and go and look it up. It's particularly good at resolving digital signal types.
Berni M0XYF
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As some of you may be aware, I've been away on holiday for a couple of weeks, hence the lack of rambling emails and fresh website content.
My absence has also meant the temporary suspension of the WebSDR trial, which has now been restored and is once again available for you to use.
I did see that the club successfully ran its first RDF event of the year yesterday evening, and four teams turned out to hunt down the Foxy Peter G4AKG, Tony G3XQM and Mike G8KMP, so well done to everyone who took part and I hope you all had a good time. If anyone has any pictures from the night, I'd be very happy to post them up on the website. I'd particularly be interested in any photos of Peter buying the first round of drinks, because they'll be quite valuable one day. Sorry Peter :)
This week I'll be putting together a simple proposal for the committee on the future of the WebSDR and associated antenna installation after having had a brief chat with Phil last week. I'll post this in the members section, so check that out in a few days. If anyone has any contributions on that front, or any constructive opinions to opine, then please contact me directly ASAP. No point moaning after the event if you don't engage at this point.
I also have some exciting news on the training front. It's training, but not as you know it! Watch this space while I finalise the details and work through the practicalities.
In the meantime, take care of yourselves in the next few days as we all prepare to roast in the ridiculous heat that's coming our way, and if any one of you should need anything in an emergency, you are more than welcome to reach out to myself or any other club member. I mean that - 40 degree heat is no laughing matter, and we should all look out for one another.
Stay safe, cool and Covid-free.
73
Berni M0XYF
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| Callsign | Gridsquare | Mode | Sent | Received | Date | Time | Band | Frequency |
| DK1PU | JO30 | FT8 | 4 | 2 | 20220619 | 95230 | 40m | 7.075832 |
| 2E0UJR | IO91 | FT8 | 10 | -5 | 20220619 | 100630 | 40m | 7.075832 |
| HA7TM | JN97 | FT8 | -11 | -7 | 20220619 | 101130 | 20m | 14.075832 |
| DH2NJS | JO50 | FT8 | 0 | -15 | 20220619 | 101600 | 20m | 14.075832 |
| PD4FL | JO33 | FT8 | 4 | -5 | 20220619 | 110400 | 20m | 14.075832 |
| K5EK | FM03 | FT8 | -12 | -14 | 20220619 | 112400 | 20m | 14.076072 |
| PD7RF | JO22 | FT8 | -9 | -18 | 20220619 | 113030 | 20m | 14.076198 |
| DG9SDN | JO52 | FT8 | 0 | -10 | 20220619 | 115415 | 20m | 14.075931 |
| RW4C | LO21 | FT8 | -6 | -15 | 20220619 | 121245 | 20m | 14.07621 |
| PD2RLD | JO23 | FT8 | 13 | -4 | 20220619 | 121445 | 20m | 14.075764 |
| MQ0HVU | FT8 | -5 | -12 | 20220619 | 121630 | 20m | 14.075876 | |
| CT1BSD | IM58 | FT8 | -8 | -10 | 20220619 | 121815 | 20m | 14.075876 |
| DK7ZT | FT8 | -5 | -1 | 20220619 | 121915 | 20m | 14.075876 | |
| II3WRTC | FT8 | 11 | -16 | 20220619 | 125315 | 20m | 14.075876 | |
| R6LJK | KN97 | FT8 | -11 | -15 | 20220619 | 131030 | 20m | 14.075876 |
| OH3EYR | KP20 | FT8 | -8 | -3 | 20220619 | 131245 | 20m | 14.076353 |
| DL2HJD | JN48 | FT8 | -5 | -15 | 20220619 | 132130 | 30m | 10.137272 |
| OH8LXT | KP23 | FT8 | -7 | -12 | 20220619 | 133600 | 30m | 10.137202 |
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This weekend saw a few extremely committed members take on what was by far (I imagine, though I’m happy to be corrected) the biggest and most expansive demonstration of amateur radio equipment the club has ever attempted.
There were a few apprehensive visits to various weather websites on Saturday evening and a restless night for some, but once Sunday morning rolled around we were thankfully greeted with dry conditions underfoot and a uniformly pale grey sky. I for one would have been royally cheesed-off if I had found an event cancellation notification in my inbox, but fortunately there was Nothing Heard.
Myself, Mervyn M0WVE, Chris M7VJE, Phil G4UDU and Peter G4AKG rocked up in St. Johns Park at 9:00am with all the gear and plenty of ideas. A sensible amount of planning had gone into assembling something cohesive for Town Day, but it certainly wasn’t onerous. Each individual’s preparation efforts though, were clearly erudite and thoughtful.
We were also relying on our innate ability to make things happen with whatever we had packed in the cars and I never doubted that we would be able to put on a decent display, and so it proved.
Were there things we could have done better? Of course, but I was hugely proud of what our little group achieved, and we were grateful for the support early-doors of Adrian M0TCD and Russell G7TMR, and I can’t thank them enough for being there. Every single member would have been welcome to join us, and whilst I appreciate that several people have very real reasons for not being able to attend, I’m sad that the rest of you missed out on what was a historic landmark in the club’s history.
I’m not overstating that point either. It’s a seminal moment when the club puts on the biggest public-facing display of radio technology in it’s history, and there wasn’t a single SSB phone contact made all day. In fact I’m not sure we even had a microphone with us, let alone a Morse key and yet we made multiple contacts via DMR handhelds across the internet, had QSO’s via CubeSats passing overhead in Low Earth Orbit, and logged many FT8 contacts across multiple HF bands.
We had our very own KiwiSDR running on screens within a welcoming open-sided event shelter, and hardware SDRs running on other laptops and monitors (in fact we had more laptops, displaying more engaging, relatable information, maps and data than I could have realistically imagined). There were multiple laptops and iPads running FlexRadio’s SmartSDR remote client software too, all hooked up to Phil’s HF station at home. Most sub-stations were tethered to phones or using 4G dongles.
We had digital hotspots, an EFHW ‘inverted L’ HF antenna resonant on 40m 20m 15m and 10m (you simply have to have a big ‘ole antenna up at these gigs, if only to get you noticed) a Tarheel multi-band antenna on a tripod and the little Procom wideband antenna I’m currently testing up on an 8 foot pole. There was a big 32” flat-screen continually playing-out RSGB promotional videos and AMSAT tutorials etc. whilst other monitors were displaying various slices of radio spectrum and waterfall visualisations.
All this was kept fed by Phil G4UDU’s fantastic little Honda generator, which was more than up to the job, and which ran whisper-quiet all day. A 1kW generator was probably overkill, or so you would have thought - but we were actually consuming more than half of that output to keep all the amazing tech powered up!
The fair did endure a couple of light rain showers during the morning, and that undoubtedly affected visitor numbers generally, but things cheered up again in the afternoon and a few more people showed up. Given the relatively small attendance, I thought we did really well in attracting several interesting people to our pitch. A long-term CBer considering the foundation exam, a leader from the Air Cadets keen on working with us on a collaboration, a professional comms. engineer who was genuinely impressed with what he saw, a couple of SWL’s potentially interested in taking their hobby further and three of four licenced amateurs who checked in, all of whom either already follow our website updates or who went away having scanned our URL QR codes.
We also had constructive discussions with Scout and Guide leaders around future radio-related opportunities. Everyone who visited went away with a slick colour RSGB leaflet, and the resonating sound of can-do MSARS attitude in their lug-holes.
We even caught the eye of the new Town Mayor, Peter Chapman AKA Mr BHU accompanied by fellow town councillor Anne Eves. I hope they appreciate the up-tick in their kudos gained from their association with the Mid Sussex Amateur Radio Society :)
It was great to have Adrian there, and we did manage to have a brief chat about training during the day, but we intend to get together soon to flesh out what we think can be achieved on that front, so watch this space.
As it happens, Adrian is also the caretaker of the QRZ pages for the club’s various call signs, and this proved useful on the day as he was required to make another landmark change for the club, because for the first time ever we were operating the G5RV callsign on digital modes! This was explicitly contradicted by the existing QRZ entry, and that was therefore duly updated to reflect its new status as of Sunday. I will manually get those QSOs uploaded somewhere online ASAP for the benefit of all those that clamoured to get that one in the log. A collector’s item for sure.
We also used our personal callsigns on the day, as well as our Special Event Callsign for Burgess Hill Town Day - GB1BH.
Yes, all those years of discounting the illegal use of Louis’ legendary callsign by unscrupulous operators around the world, and then we broke out the big guns officially on Sunday. We absolutely battered the globe with our treasured and much vaunted identifier, and I hope Louis would approve of its use in signalling the start of a new chapter for our club in this digitally enhanced world. The G5RV callsign racked up 844 reports and was heard in 54 different countries in one day. Now that's never happened before!
There is now undoubtedly a solid core of members with the foresight, enthusiasm and determination to usher the club forward, because it’s desperately in need of a technology transfusion.
I’m also happy to note the positive outlook of many of the club’s elders, and I have to register my respect for that. Clubs that can’t assimilate the latest technological advancements will not fare well in the coming years. There is room for all disciplines within amateur radio, and that’s what makes it great in my opinion. Now let’s crack on, because this is happening!
Berni M0XYF
