A Great Weekend

As you can see we had a great weekend's contesting despite the weather being truly appalling on Saturday. Conditions on the bands were very good, particularly on 15 metres and we certainly worked some good DX including China, Thailand, Singapore and plenty of Australians!


We beat last years points score, which for us is what its all about. This is our first time at Andrew's new home and the location proved to be an excellent one for radio and gave us a chance to use the Spiderbeam for the first time in this particular contest, its nice when you have a big back garden to play in!

This Weekend's Contest

Getting ready for this weekend's big 48 hour contest at Andrew's home. It is fine at the moment, as the sun has just gone down, but strong winds and heavy rain forecast for tomorrow. The location is quite exposed so we hope that all is lashed down tightly enough! Just putting the station together in the house at the moment for the start in a few hours time! Good luck in the contest folks!

QSL Cards and Things

The QSL cards for Jura are designed and will go to print this next week, so should be posted out in the next few weeks. Still a busy time for us with other things as well. It was our AGM last week and Sands is now into its fifth year of existence, hard to know where the time has gone. Frank has very kindly volunteered to be our treasurer this year ( most people run a mile when they hear this role mentioned ) and has the joy of sorting out all the finances from our trip!!
Next weekend one of the longest contests in the calendar, the CQ WW DX Contest which lasts the full 48 hours. This year we will be operational from Andrew's home, he has a big back garden and it means we are able to put the Spiderbeam up on one of the masts. Also coming up is the Christmas meal and it looks like we are going to have quite a few guests this year, the more the merrier!
This morning several of us are off to the QRP Convention, at a new venue this year near Halifax. This is always a good rally, we didn't have time to organise a table this year for club funds due to the sheer time it has taken to organise the Jura trip, still it will be good just to have a wander round and meet up with old friends!

Amateur Radio Training

Kev and Ian, two of our members, are involved with a new Amateur Radio training website. It launched this weekend and aims to bring together training material from the internet into a central site. It also has the added advantage of a forum to allow potential licensees and amateurs wishing to progress through the licensing system to interact with each other and registered instructors who are always on hand to help! The forum also has a whole series of mini-lessons (Learning Curves) available to registered users, registration is free and simple from the forum pages. Also available on the site are sample exam questions and an FAQ. Anyone is welcome, at any level of licence, whether to learn, improve or to teach and guide!

Click here to visit Amateur Radio Training

Some Photographs from Jura

Spiderbeam and the sea

The 80 metre station

Kev G6FKE

Ian G0VGS

Paul M1PAF


Portable 20m Moxon

Antenna Farm

Logs For Jura

The logs for Jura are now online. You can see if you worked us and on what band by entering your callsign in the search box proved.

Click here to see if you are in the Jura Logs

Home Safely

Finally another photograph for you. This shows the vertical 20m moxon that Steve and Paul used down on the beach! We are all home intact and the last person got to bed about 01:00 GMT on Tuesday morning. The rest of the day was spent unpacking and unwinding and an early night for all. More photographs will be added this week to the blog showing the operators and antennas at MS0SCG as we get sorted.