Another Good Contest

Thats the end of CQWW SSB for yet another year and has been very enjoyable. We smashed last years score logging over 900 contacts in the 48 hour period. Conditions were variable but the bands were busy. Some of the best DX was in the early hours of the morning as you would expect. The station was well attended by both members and guests and the FT1000 MkV performed beautifully as always. The next big contests are in the New Year with one or two smaller ones before Christmas.

CQWW Sunday Morning

So far a very busy weekend. Conditions promised to be poor but have turned out to be excellent, even 10 metres has been busy. Plenty of rare DX worked including Galapagos, which was a first for Mark. Kev and Brian took the night shifts as usual and have had contacts all over the world in the early hours. The beam is now up and 10 metres very lively.....

Jamboree

JOTA weekend is now behind us and was well attended. Both stations worked very well ( note the well designed data interface). Thanks to Andrew for all the arrangements and the scouts for their enthusiasm. We now move on to the big 48 hour contest this weekend, remembering at some point to put the clocks back to GMT. The rotator we will be using was fixed last week thanks to Ian and Kev and we anticipate a good weekend!

GB50LDS

This weekend is" Jamboree on the Air" and we will be down at the small village of Overton for the weekend. We will be using simple dipole antennas for HF and a colinear for VHF on one of our 50' masts. Hopefully the weekend will be well attended by both scouts and guides. The callsign used will be GB50LDS.

80M SSB Sprint

Several members of Sands took part in the second leg of the 80 metre sprint contest yesterday evening. It was an interesting contest but certainly took some reading of the rules. If you initiated a CQ call on a frequency you could only work one station and then had to QSY to a different frequency. It was a lot of fun and certainly stopped some of the problems of the 80m Club Championships that run in the first half of the year. Everybody was polite and shows what fun can be had in these type of contests!

Fantastic Rally

Sands enjoyed a fabulous day out at the Rochdale QRP Convention. The journey there was incident free with fantastic views in the early morning sunrise. The Rally was very busy indeed and by midday there was very little room to move. This is a traditional rally which has no computer traders and deals mainly with radio components and lots of older amateur gear. Lunch was pie and peas and fruit pie to round it all off! We had a very profitable day and also had time to catch up with many old friends and meet many new ones. Next year the rally will be moving down the road to Halifax and although it will be at a larger venue the organizers hope to maintain the atmosphere of previous rallies.