I quick Google later I found out that this is an on going issue with the FCC, ARRL and just about every governing body in the US. So not really legal but loop holes are loop holes. Time to close them.

Oh dear

Over the next few days I’ll be collating all the log sheets we have and totting up all the contacts. I’ve got quite a few to do. We seemed to be more popular than we bargained, so it’ll take a bit of effort to sort out the QSL cards and awards.

Norman, G7MRL, Noel, G4PEW, Liz M6EPW and myself will undoubtedly be back next year and hopefully colin, M0XSD can do better with his lurgy timing with our muddy antenna installation and modest transceivers to do battle with high winds and rain as well as frozen soil so thanks to everyone who answered our calls, forgave our ability to forget your callsign, call you by someone else’s name or listened without switching off to us repeating ourselves with the same facts and figures that we’d handed out in the previous over. You’ve all made our 2 weekends of SOS Radio week enjoyable and most of all memorable.

GB4LBC going QRT

Lovely morning for radio

The St Bees lifeboat station manager has been so helpful and not at all concerned by our muddy footprints that have given away our movements on his clean floor. We’ll need to clean it up properly tomorrow afternoon.

Conditions weren’t as good as last weekend. The band seemed to have a lot of static in the morning and QRM at lunchtime followed by bedlam in the afternoon with stations on top of each other on 40m. 20m was contest town and we only managed 1 contact before be gave it up as a bad idea. 17m, 12m and 10m gave a few contacts including Greece on 10m FM, which was nice.

Both Norman and myself had a tiring day and at 3pm headed back to 40m for a few more QSO’s. We’re back on the air tomorrow although I’m on home duties in the morning but Noel and Norman will be on in the morning. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to use my 6m 5/8 vertical.

Anyway, although it was a tiring day we couldn’t have filled 5 pages in the log without everyone coming back to our CQ call. Without those patient people who  helped us when the conditions were against us. The number of stations that wanted our little extra award certainly helped get the numbers up. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that GB1LBC will be in big demand tomorrow after Bill had to call it a day with feeder troubles today.

I’ve spent the best part of an hour changing passwords and resetting things and this site hold no ‘email-able’ information so there shouldn’t be any coming through but if you’ve been got then I apologise and I’d like to say it’ll never happen again but you know how it is.

It happened at 8.37am today and the password was changed by 9am so it was the best I could do.

Very annoyed about it!

The station will be up and running again tomorrow on 40m and hopefully will be just as popular. The Workington and district club (MX0WRC) is operating 3 of the 4 stations in Cumbria

GB1LBC – Silloth
GB2LBC – Workington
GB4LBC – St Bees
GB5LBC – Barrow in Furness

GB5LBC is operated by our friends at Furness ARS and we managed to have a quick QSO during the pile up

The purpose of our time on the air as special event stations is to promote the RNLI  as a charity, something that costs £300,000 a day to run!

St Bees will only be running at the weekends and We are looking to be on mainly 40m and 80m but the Cobwebb is coming with me so there is a possibility of something on the higher bands but it really depends on the weather as high winds will certainly destroy it.

I hope to work as many as possible in between cups of tea and choccy biccies and if you would like to make a donation then it would be really appreciated. Keep an eye out on the status monitors to see when we’re up and running.

Time is very important with JT65 and a few other modes and I’ve never been a big fan of windows time setting utility. It never seems to be right and there is always a problem with either this or that. I use Dimension 4 on XP machines and it works very well. Under Windows 7 you have to remember to run it as an administrator so I suspect the same will be true for Vista. there seemed to be a bit of a conflict going on on my puny little computer so I had to reinstall JT65-HF and only then did it start to decode the received signals.

I took the opportunity to use my stealth antenna (A Watson 80 plus 2 dipole – which is really only good for 20m here) and immediately got a contact with DG8RW & W3PV with 15 watts. I had a bit of trouble with the first contact as he couldn’t copy my signal report for a while and I had to resend it quite a few times before he got it. Eventually we got a QSO together and that was pretty pleasing.

So I’ve got my hands dirty again with JT65 and whilst its not the most interactive of modes it reinforces the fact that SSB is inefficient in comparison as I doubt I’d have got where I did with 15 watts and a loft mounted antenna. Still, it was a nice distraction from what I should have been doing. That was to be revising for an exam on Tuesday. Nothing exciting, a professional exam and much less enjoyable that playing with radios.

I thought I’d try and listen out for the ISS if it was passing me by and using HamSatDroid on my trusty phone I was presented with a big fat ‘not today you won’t’.  I remembered that I hadn’t updated the Keplerian data before checking the passes so I did and the programme defaults to the first on the list. AO-07. It showed that it was due to make a pass in about an hour. With this opportunity I assembled my Sotabeams SB270 and checked to see if the pass was easily visible from my house, i.e. from about SW to roughly NNE and luckily it was so I thought this would be an opportunity to taken.

Bearing in mind it was dark at this time and my decking needs a good coat of ‘taking down and rebuilding thanks to Story homes’ I pointed the antenna skyward and was met with a crackly warbly of ‘CQ satellite’ from a German station. he called CQ for the complete pass and I didn’t hear a single response to his calling. At this point I wish I had a duplexer connected to the antenna and a steady tripod as well as a handy lightweight rotator to help with the pass as this was too good an opportunity to miss. Alas I had none of the above and the station went unanswered. A 2m / 70cm duplexer is now on the shopping list as the chance of me being able to spend some time making a rotator is fairly small. Perhaps a larger one will come available at a Hamfest or eBay.

VHF is by no means easy at my QTH but there seem to be opportunities and its probably about time I explored a few of them

Contests are really not my thing but they do give you opportunities that might not be available at other times in the calendar. For me it was a new one VP9 or Bermuda in English and a welcome break from revision for my MSc exams

The screenshot above is just a taste of what was taking over the lower portion of the 20m band. I did actually fancy a few PSK-31 QSO’s but glad I ended up giving RTTY a go. probably not the most conversational of the data modes where you actually type in real time but still nice to get the VP9 in the log.