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- Written by: Phil G4UDU
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Sunday the 20th of February 2022 was the day that Ken G3WYN and Sean EI7CV had their 2000th QSO.
I set off just after seven in the morning to go over to see Ken to get the photographs and do a video of the actual QSO taking place.
After this was done I then went up to Whitemans Green about a mile from Ken's house set up the HF mobile so as to join in the special event.
Phil G4UDU
On 4th January 1977 Sean (EI7CV) met Ken (G3WYN) on the 80-metre band.
During a call lasting about 30 minutes, they discovered they had many interests in common. This led to their first face-to-face meeting at Ken’s home a week later. At Ken’s suggestion, a scheduled contact was arranged.
Thus began a regular series of Sunday morning contacts on 80 metres at 08:00 hrs local time. Gradually, members of the Mid Sussex Amateur Radio Society were attracted to listen in and later to participate in the regular contacts.
Besides radio contacts, Ken’s wife Stella, and Sean’s wife Nancy, with their children, took part in family meetings in Sussex and Ireland.
By May 1987, contact numbers had reached 500. Another celebration took place in November 1998 when contact number 1000 was made. Ken and Stella travelled to Dunshaughlin to celebrate the event with Sean and Nancy.
Sad to say that although Ken an Sean are still in regular contact every Sunday, Nancy and Stella are no longer with us.
On February 20th 2022, Ken and Sean celebrated contact number 2000. This has been a wonderful achievement in maintaining regular radio contacts on a weekly basis since 1977.
Despite their advancing years, they hope to continue for some time.
A video recording of the 2000th contact can be found on our Videos page.
Thanks also to Mervyn M0WVE for providing an audio recording of the entire net, which can be downloaded below (approx. 12MB)
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- Written by: Maintenance Guy
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We made it! The final day went without any problems, and I managed to make an improvement to the sound levels from the radio interface, so thanks to Chris for letting me know about that. I have to have the input level set to around 15 for WSJT-X and any other digital software and 100 for Zoom. Just another setting I have to remember to change when swapping backwards and forwards between different applications. Bob and Chris on Zoom today. Dick unable to log in on his mobile from Jack & Jill car park. You just can't get a decent signal up there :p
Chatting briefly to Dick (great 5 & 9 + 10 signal today) I have to agree that having an antenna available on the top of the downs would be incredible. If we had a source of power and somewhere to stick a little Ubiquiti Air Max NanoBeam AC Gen2 WiFi dish to link back to the club shack with its existing 70Mbps backhaul capability (being directly opposite the Burgess Hill BT exchange), it would be the dream ticket. We could stream 10MHz of I/Q data directly into the big network, no problem. I wonder if we have Line-of-Sight?
In between all my other projects, I'm going to try an old Pi3b and my RSPdx on a new fast (100Mbps down, 20Mbps up) fibre connection which I'll hopefully have available from next Tuesday. I can remote the RSPdx, and we can have a play with that.
Until then, enjoy the improving band and weather conditions.
M0XYF
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- Written by: Richard G0LFF
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VOACAP shows that props on 15m SSB with a ¼ wave vertical/high dipole to Bob N4XAT should be possible again today on the lunchtime HF net.
Bob and I exchanged QSL cards for our noise-floor SSB QSO on Wednesday with 32/33 reports.
GL Dick-G0LFF
Click to enlarge...
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- Written by: Maintenance Guy
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Interesting lunchtime net today (and we were back on 21.345 MHz) with many of the usual suspects in attendance.
Good to chat with all of you, and nice to see Merv and Dick popping up on Zoom to join the virtual side of the Net.
The audio that I'm porting into Zoom is the receive audio straight out of the radio, so I apologise that none of my overs were heard via Zoom. I don't think there's anything I can do about that with this setup, but of course it could be done somehow if we really wanted to in the future. I could always run a second instance of Zoom elsewhere in the shack with a regular microphone for example.
I should say, that during my 'silent' overs, I did inform the Net of the presence of the Zoom attendees and passed on the messages from Dick, which was my main motivation for hitting the PTT button in the first place.
What I'm interested in doing going forward is to have a receiver in the club shack that we can access remotely. That means that all of us can effectively have an additional receive antenna in a location that isn't our home QTH, yet is local enough that our Nets can be properly heard by our friends overseas, as well as those in local dead spots, those with severely compromised antenna situations, or with bands completely outside of their current receiving capabilities. I'm convinced we could do that with a little SDRPlay and a Raspberry Pi or similar without falling foul of any Hall rules or insurance clauses and without breaking the bank. It will just take a little resolve and some organising. Maybe we could use battery power for example. I don't know. Something to look into.
I hope everyone has found it interesting, and can see the benefits of being able to do such a thing. Zoom isn't the permanent answer, but it has helped us explore one or two new avenues.
Anyway, let's see what tomorrow brings, and also look forward to Phil's second Marconi talk tomorrow evening.
73, M0XYF
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- Written by: Maintenance Guy
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William Greenwell joined our society in 2005 and eventually obtained the callsign M3VRE at one of our weekend training classes.
The Society have had outside events on his property including Mills Weekend as there was a watermill there many years ago, and we also put up stations at a couple of fetes he held there to raise money for St. Giles roof repair.
William often appeared at our BBQ’s, Boule, skittles & Friday night meetings.
He also came to several of our Christmas meals, dressed impeccably.
William became a SK on the 16th January after suffering a heart attack.
His funeral was held at St. Giles, Shermanbury on Friday 4th February.
R.I.P.
