Whitton Amateur Radio Group

West London Electronics Show at Kempton Race course Sunbury on Thames

Sunday 11 November 2012 opens at 10am

www.radiofairs.co.uk

With the end of IOTA contest weekend coming to a exciting end some of the club members still had the ‘contest calling’ which they needed to get out of their system. The answer came with the very special invite from an old contest friend of the club Nobby G0VJG; the invite was for club members to participate in the London Games Amateur Radio Station 2012L the largest UK event station since the GB50 Golden Jubilee station at Windsor Castle.

2012L is based near the Olympic Games in New Eltham, Southeast London to operate for the same duration as the Olympic and Paralympic sporting events. We recommend that you review the web site http://www.2o12l.com/ as there are some excellent photographs of the station and antennas, which we would all like in our suburban back gardens!

Within the 2O12L web site they have an on line log book so that you can ‘double check’ your call sign just to make sure that if you did make a contact that you have been correctly noted down. Looking through the statistics the number of repeat contacts on numerous bands show how popular the special event turned out to be.

The Whitton members who took part:-
Garo G0PZA, Toby 2E0TBO (also IT Manager for 2O12L) and Colin (2) 2E0NOC

Our yearly ritual of trekking down to the South Coast for the IOTA contest was once more a huge triumph for the club and we would once more like to thank Kevin G1KAW for organizing this.

As with previous years operations the station consisted of two ICOM IC756PRO III’s together with a 10-15-20M 3 element beam and our monster multi band beam a Mosley Pro 57B with 40m add-on shown in this photograph, was hand turned which was an effort during the night!   Adding to this were 40m and 80m verticals. Kevin G1KAW, Toby 2E0TBO, Garo G0PZA Colin 2E0NOC, Grahame M6GAN, Colin M0DMJ and Jack, our resident SWL, erected all the antennas for the weekend, on the Friday, ready for IOTA on the Saturday.

Undertaking such contests, there are always happy memories and this year there were two highlights one unexpected with Colin M0DMJ and Jack dishing up the biggest BBQ the club has ever seen for a number of years and the second  unexpected was a old friend of the club calling in on 20m Vlad, UA9FAR.  It was a shame that we never had the opportunity to chat with Vlad, but with a bit of luck, we will catch up with him on a Friday club evening when using our club call GX0MIN.

Jonathan G8GD had quite a week before the contest having taken part in ‘Follow the Torch’ GX4WAB an Olympic station based in Hampton West London.  Jonathan G8GD has also added a selection of photos within our Yahoo group. Although they are reduced in resolution from the originals they do show how the weekend went.

Toby 2E0TBO is a member of the Project Echo 2O12L Olympic station in the Royal Borough of Greenwich as the IT Manager, who spent the earlier part of the week assembling antennas, setting up the IT network and spent the first night working the world when the station started.  He still found the time to join us on Friday and not only erected antennas, he also took two four-hour SSB shifts.  Thank you Toby.

If you are a member of another contest club who took part in IOTA, and you are therefore interested then you will be asking yourself ‘so how did they get on?’  We operated on both CW and SSB using 3,5, 7, 14, 21, and 28megs.  If Colin has done his sums correctly then our score for the weekend should be in the region of 5.2 Million points, some 44% up on last year (thank you IOTA for changing the scoring system!)  We found the band conditions generally hard going at times resulting in falling back onto CW, which consisted of about 50% of our total QSO’s mainly due to G0PZA!

If you did make contact with M2W over the weekend or within past HF contests and you would like to ‘double check’ that we have logged you correctly then we have a log book facility in ‘Log Search’  (see the above drop down link) just type in your call and it will list the times you have been logged.  We also have similar logs for our other club call signs.

Our contest team this year was Kevin G1KAW, Toby 2E0TBO, Garo G0PZA, Tony G4KLF, Colin M0DMJ, Colin (2) 2E0NOC, Grahame M6GAN, David G0MRF, Jonathan G8GD and Ian G0OFN.

QSL cards are via the RSGB or Eqsl, LOTW, HRD Lognet and Clublog.

We’ve been awarded a certificate for a reception from ARISSAT-1

The secret word heard was EXPLORE

Date Friday 19/8/2011
Time 19.25 UTC
145.950 MHz ICOM 910

Whitton Amateur Radio Group G0MIN

Also heard some voice telemetry. Panel temp 24 degrees Battery voltage 35.62V
and 2 frames of SSTV which did not decode on Ham Radio deluxe

This year the club returned to the South Coast for the second time because of the fantastic location with height and space to erect aerials and we would like to thank our Kevin G1KAW for organising this.

This year’s station was using our tried and trusted ICOMs IC756PRO III’s together with the following antennas: 10-15-20M 2 element Quad at 60ft, 10-15-20m Yagi at 35ft, 40M Vertical, 40M dipole and 80M Vertical. All the antennas were painstakingly assembled, erected and adjusted from scratch just for the contest. Thank goodness for the excellent weather. (Special thanks to Kevin G1KAW and Toby M6TBY).

Operation was is in the 3.5, 7, 14, 21 and 28MHz bands.

The mast and three band quad was supplied by Nobby G0VJG and Ralph, M0MYC, as

both joined the team for the IOTA contest. The quad with out doubt gave the main station an edge even over the three-element beam, which was reallocated to our multi finding station.

Within the log book section of our web page you can insert your call sign to see
if we correctly logged your contact with us. QSL cards are advaible using the
RSGB QSL Bureau or on line via Eqsl.

For all those teams and operators around the world who answered our CQ calls
a big ‘thank you’ to you all from the Whitton Amateur Radio Group team, comprising: Garo G0PZA, Colin M0DMJ, Colin 2E0NOC, Kevin G1KAW, Toby M6TBY, Ian G0OFN, Nobby G0VJG and Ralph M0MYC.

Our results; we are hoping subject to confirmation that this year we have bettered last year effort, and even beat our own target. QSO totals were up 17% on last year, at 1808, Multipliers were up by 29% at 354 and the total score was 57% higher than last year, at about 3.6Million points. Last year’s EU005 top score in the 24hour Multi Single category was about 3.0Million, so we are delighted with our performance, given that we are not a fixed station!

We generally found that band conditions were favourable, but we did miss some opportunities on 80M and 15M, in particular on CW. Highlights included being called by a ZL at 7 am on 40M running on our dipole, and some strong BD/BV stations alongside the Russian powerhouses.

Our M2W breakdown per band and mode is as follows;-

We are looking forward to IOTA 2012.

• #1 in UK
• #14 in Europe
• 4,193,640 Points

Congratulations to all who helped with this effort.

Previous Article Here

SSB: March 26-27, 2011

The club has been taking part in this event at the Whitton Community Centre and this year our main objective has been to break in our new club members and those who have never before taken part in such an event.

The station this year was a modest set up using the club ICOM 756 Pro 3 and matching ICOM amplifier. The antennas this year comprised of the main mast with the HF three element beam and two verticals one for 40 & one for 80m.

This year’s guest operator was G0VJG ‘Noby’ from Cray Valley Radio Society and the photograph of him shows him working 10m pointing state side.