During last week (24th – 29th April) the Oxford & District Amateur Radio Society ran a special event station at the Oxford Science Museum in the city centre, for the opening of the Marconi exhibition with all the artefacts Marconi used in his first experiments these were kindly donated to the museum by the Marconi Corporation.
Barry (G4AZN) in contest mode
We ran a special event station for the week during the opening times of the museum which where only 11am – 3pm UTC, due to the fact of being in the centre of the city the local noise level was very high at around S8 although for me its about the same as being at home due to living on university campus.
For the event we had a 20/40m Dipoles on the top of the museum roof and also a vertical to cover all the missing bands, radio wise it varied greatly due to the fact we had a couple of small problems during the event at the start we used a Kenwood TS870S which belonged to Barry (G4AZN) but on Thursday problems struck and we found that it wouldn’t transmit, so I had a quick walk home to get the ICOM IC-706MKIIG although this meant we lost being able to use 400w, then on Saturday, Colin (M0DDT) bought his Yaesu FT-920 rig which was wired up to work with the FL2000B amp finally again we had 400w.
Conditions for the whole of the event varied a lot we found that 40m at no point allowed working into G but no problems to GM, so most of the time we kept to operating on 20m, perhaps next time if we do an event we really need to think about a antenna for 80m.
On Tuesday I was able to get a good run into the states we found that most days that between 13:00 – 14:00 working into the states wasn’t too much problem even with 100w although it was much easier with the extra power.
We also worked some 2m although this was mostly skeds with club members or with someone on a local repeater.
Janet keeps everyone in order!
Looking back at the week I think it was an enjoyable nothing was damaged Barry found that his key was sorting itself out and its now working 100%, and by having a guess I should think we made around 400 qsos in the short time we had at the museum and everyone we worked will be getting a QSL Card Barry G4AZN will be writing this out by hand.