Sprint!

Well tonight was the first SSB leg of the new RSGB CC Sprint contest on 80m. Great fun :) It takes a bit of getting used to as once you have called CQ on a frequency, you have to give away the frequency to the person you worked! It levels the playing field rather nicely. A few of our members took part and the challenges are now set for the next leg!

Getting Busy!

It is a busy time for us at the moment with the trip to Jura being only just over a month away. We have hired a transit van for the trip which will be an immense help with the amount of gear we are taking and the cost, including fuel, is very reasonable! All equipment is being checked over and various lists prepared to make sure everything is accounted for. Information about the event is now on the home website and on QRZ.com under MSoSCG.
Meanwhile we have HF SSB Field Day coming up on the 6/7th September. This promises to be one of the busiest weekends for radio this year. We will, again, be located at Barrie's G1JYB, thanks again to his and Kathy's generosity. We also hope to be joined by Chris and Bex, who are hoping to travel up from Coventry for the weekend, it will be great to have them on board again for a major contest! This year we will again run in the restricted section which means a single element antenna and no more than 100 watts. Field Day will also give us a last chance to check out the Spiderbeam, masts and any other equipment going to Jura to make sure all is in order.
Finally the transfer of our homepages to the new server went very smoothly and hopefully you will find them informative and a lot faster to browse. Oh ....nearly forgot...congratulations to Faris M6FAZ who passed his intermediate licence exam with flying colours last week!

Moving to a New Server

On Monday morning we will be moving the Sands home webpages to a new server so there may be some downtime. The new server is a Shuttle K45 Pentium P4 with 2GB RAM. It will run under Ubuntu Linux. The new server is very low power, very small in size and runs at an average of 35w only. Very green but also very quick. GB7MBC will also be on the same machine so the downtime will also affect the users of the DXCluster!

Video Section Now Available!

We now have a video section available on the home website which shows a few clips of what we get up to.Click on the link or visit the site and go to the Media tab. We will add to this as time allows and the site grows. There is also a separate section for the Jura trip which gives all the details we have available at the moment.