AmateurRadio.com

Well it never rains….

Sometimes it snows

Other days it blows a gale

That’s the simple tale of gb4lbc this weekend. Our special event station barely made it off the ground. Or rather it nearly did because of the wind. Any wire antennas would have been blown down and would have hurt someone.

So its a shame we didn’t get much air time this weekend but maybe next time.

Better safe than sorry

GB4LBC has now shut down, we’ve amassed quite a few contacts over this weekend to add to our haul from last weekend as well. The loan of the old shop from St Bees lifeboat was very much appreciated by all of us that got involved. I managed to get a couple of 2m FM contacts from the top of the headland before the battery died on me and fired up the Monday night intercontinental special (loosely based on just about every other vertical but with one exception – It wasn’t resonant on the band it should have been). I’ll check it with the analyser shortly to see what I’ve managed to do with it but even when it was tuned by the autotuner and at an awful efficiency no doubt I managed a couple of DX contacts to add into the book.

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

Well, that has to be the longest day I’ve ever spent at the mic. Both Norman, G7MRL and myself have been at the coalface from about 8am. The morning sun was just starting to peep through the fells and made for a lovely sight. The bonus was that the ground that had been boggy and muddy last week was stiff with the hard morning frost and it made setting up the mast much easier.

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.

It been a real pleasure to be operating the GB4LBC special event station for SOS radio week today. With just a long wire and 100w we had our own little pile up which lasted pretty much all day.

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