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- Written by: Richard G0LFF
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VOACAP shows that props on 15m SSB with a ¼ wave vertical/high dipole to Bob N4XAT should be possible again today on the lunchtime HF net.
Bob and I exchanged QSL cards for our noise-floor SSB QSO on Wednesday with 32/33 reports.
GL Dick-G0LFF
Click to enlarge...
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- Written by: Maintenance Guy
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Interesting lunchtime net today (and we were back on 21.345 MHz) with many of the usual suspects in attendance.
Good to chat with all of you, and nice to see Merv and Dick popping up on Zoom to join the virtual side of the Net.
The audio that I'm porting into Zoom is the receive audio straight out of the radio, so I apologise that none of my overs were heard via Zoom. I don't think there's anything I can do about that with this setup, but of course it could be done somehow if we really wanted to in the future. I could always run a second instance of Zoom elsewhere in the shack with a regular microphone for example.
I should say, that during my 'silent' overs, I did inform the Net of the presence of the Zoom attendees and passed on the messages from Dick, which was my main motivation for hitting the PTT button in the first place.
What I'm interested in doing going forward is to have a receiver in the club shack that we can access remotely. That means that all of us can effectively have an additional receive antenna in a location that isn't our home QTH, yet is local enough that our Nets can be properly heard by our friends overseas, as well as those in local dead spots, those with severely compromised antenna situations, or with bands completely outside of their current receiving capabilities. I'm convinced we could do that with a little SDRPlay and a Raspberry Pi or similar without falling foul of any Hall rules or insurance clauses and without breaking the bank. It will just take a little resolve and some organising. Maybe we could use battery power for example. I don't know. Something to look into.
I hope everyone has found it interesting, and can see the benefits of being able to do such a thing. Zoom isn't the permanent answer, but it has helped us explore one or two new avenues.
Anyway, let's see what tomorrow brings, and also look forward to Phil's second Marconi talk tomorrow evening.
73, M0XYF
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- Written by: Maintenance Guy
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William Greenwell joined our society in 2005 and eventually obtained the callsign M3VRE at one of our weekend training classes.
The Society have had outside events on his property including Mills Weekend as there was a watermill there many years ago, and we also put up stations at a couple of fetes he held there to raise money for St. Giles roof repair.
William often appeared at our BBQ’s, Boule, skittles & Friday night meetings.
He also came to several of our Christmas meals, dressed impeccably.
William became a SK on the 16th January after suffering a heart attack.
His funeral was held at St. Giles, Shermanbury on Friday 4th February.
R.I.P.
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- Written by: Maintenance Guy
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Just a quick update from me (no more video uploads this week, as it's just too time consuming).
Everything went well again today, although band conditions weren't so good. For the third time this week, we had to shuffle on down the band to 21.343 MHz due to a couple of strong German stations taking up residence on 21.346 MHz from around 13:15 each day.
Small snippets of David (WB1EAD) wafted across the pond, but nothing heard from Steve GJ6WRI - even though Dick G0LFF/M drove up to Firle Beacon to maximise his chances of a contact. Bob N4XAT and Chris M7VJE joined the Zoom stream. Hope you start feeling better soon Chris.
It seems to work well for Zoom participants, but they obviously only get to hear what I hear. David was making it into me better yesterday - similar to what Russell was hearing based on his reports from yesterday. Sadly I get nothing from Ray, but glad that he's doing some good work on CW. Well done to him.
Bob isn't around tomorrow - he's on his Navy HF Net, but he said that he'll try and join us again on Friday.
If anyone else wants to get in on the act tomorrow (and you don't have to be a member, or even be licenced) then you will be made very welcome.
73, M0XYF.
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Great to see Bob N4XAT join today's Zoom experiment. We did manage to have a brief 'QSO' on the Zoom chat, although we both had our hands full of technical 'stuff' I think!
As you can see in the chat box (click the image to enlarge it), Bob was running Zoom to hear the Sussex crew, The W1NT WebSDR to hear David, Messenger to read what was going on with Steve GJ6WRI (great that you could join us Steve) as well as his Kenwood tuned to 21.343MHz!
OK, so this isn't really ground-breaking stuff, as it's basically what we do to audio-stream our 70cms GB3HY repeater net, but I wanted to see how it would sound on HF with the totally different noise conditions etc. and it seems to be working reasonably well.
It would be nice if tomorrow, somebody with Messenger could inject Bob's Messenger chat back into the radio Net, or join the Zoom call to do the same. It must be frustrating not having the capability to reply in any way. Sorry, I don't use Messenger and transmitting on the same radio that's streaming to Zoom doesn't seem to work very well for some reason.
I'm currently uploading today's recording to our YouTube channel. Edited, it's about 24 minutes. Find it here: https://youtu.be/NRwpHZ49Hng
