OPEN UNIVERSITY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB
NEWS LETTER no:51
G0OUR/G3OU Affiliated to the OU Club and the Radio Society of Great Britain
I trust this finds you in good health. As last year, we'll be holding the 2024 AGM in the shack, a little earlier than usual this year, at 12:30pm on Thursday 4th January. Those who can't make it in person can join us online, contact Paul for details p.a.maher666@gmail.com
Our last paper log ran out on 12th Jan 2023, and we’ve finally moved over to PC logging, currently using both the Log4OM and N1MM freeware programs. G3OU has been active in various contests, including the ARRL DX contest, Belgian UBA, GC - Yuri Gagarin, WPX (Worked All Prefixes, as GX3OU). We’ve also generated some small pile ups using the GX3OU callsign outside of contests.
This year we welcome back to the club ex member Ian G0TLB, who has been living abroad since leaving the OU. In the past, Ian was largely responsible for setting up and running the club’s packet node, complete with internet gateway. Ian returned to the UK this year and has taken up a post at Bristol Uni. We’re also pleased to welcome back Linda, M0CMK who has rejoined the club. Linda used to be very active from the OU shack when she lived in MK, and was our QSL manager for many years.
This year we’re pleased to welcome five new members. Ian, G4JXZ who is ex OU staff, now retired. Ian was very helpful along with Adrian M0ANS, in setting up our new shack and storage cabin, moving kit, assembling shelving units and so on. Caroline M6BGY of OU LDS, who is interested in natural emissions (Whistlers) on VLF. Laurence G4SXH who is an OU Associate Lecturer. Rodney Buckland M0RBX, also an OU Associate Lecturer. And finally OU graduate Mike, G4UPD.
Following the membership of Lawrence and Rodney, at their suggestion we’ve been in discussions regarding the club’s further involvement in the T312 module, Electronics, Signal Processing, Control and Communications. Adrian and Ian have met with Dimitar, the module Chair, and were given a tour of the Virtual Labs (the physical ones on campus). They have a high end National Instruments SDR which Dimitar brought to the shack.
To simplify communication between members, our Secretary Adrian has set up two io groups: ouarc@groups.io and OUARC-T312@groups.io. Contact Adrian if you wish to join either or both groups, adrianrawlings@gmail.com
Congratulations to Paul, M0OOM who retired from the OU in the Summer. Paul was our treasurer, a role that has to be carried out by a staff member. Al, KI6QFJ, who works in STEM has now taken on the role of treasurer for us, and Paul has agreed to continue as deputy. Congratulations also to Jeff, 2E1OUJ (ex M3OUJ), who also retired from the OU this Summer.
It’s been several years since we lost our LF antennas on the M100 mast, and more recently the new 80m dipole was broken by contractors before we even had a chance to use it. I’m pleased to say that, back in May, we erected a pair of nested dipoles, for the 80m and 40m bands, suspended from the P60 just below the Hexbeam. These are fed with coax via a ferrite choke balun at the feed point. There was just enough room, now that the trees have been trimmed back, to tilt that tower over, so we could do the work safely at ground level. Unfortunately we caused a bit of a fuss with one end of the dipoles tethered near the Security Lodge. Even though we’d used those tether points for years (decades) in the past, they apparently now represented a security, or H&S risk (we’re not sure which), so we had to remove them. However, Estates very kindly offered to have a dedicated post erected to tether the dipole support lines to. Unfortunately though the contractors didn’t put the post where we’d specified it to be, so the 40m dipole is now stuck in a tree. We’ll have to see what we can do there. In any case, moving the tether points has detuned the dipoles, so we’ll have to drop the tower down again to re-trim the wires. A never ending saga it seems.
Thank you to Adrian for manning a stall at the OU Well-being drop-in event back in May. Adrian was also representing the OU Astronomy club, and reported a fair amount of interest, although mostly for the Astronomy club!
Back in February we were approached by a researcher from Manchester Metropolitan University, who was doing research into amateur radio and what attracts people into the hobby, particularly youngsters. Several of our members gave telephone interviews in aid of the project and we gave them some other useful leads.
We have an IT issue when using Telnet to connect to the DX Cluster. Back in January Ian G0TLB diagnosed the fault, related to network address translation not maintaining the connection for more than a second or two. The result is that our logging program(s) can connect to the Cluster, but then get disconnected again almost immediately. This starts a cycle of continued connections and disconnections. The problem has been reported to the OU IT department, and chased up, but there seems to be no enthusiasm by them to resolve it. We can get round the problem by disconnecting from the OU network and tethering by Wi-Fi to a mobile phone, but it’s not an elegant or permanent solution.
On the equipment front. This year we traded in our ageing Icom IC7400 for a new Yaesu FTdx10. This is a high performance hybrid SDR, which covers HF, 6m and also 4m. Paul has connected it to one of our large monitors, and also fitted a mouse. We will be sorting out cabling to interface it to the PC, antenna switching, amplifier and keyer. Our old four way manual antenna switch is now used to switch the selected antenna to either the K3, KX3 or the FTdx10.
Our HF linear amplifier has developed an annoying intermittent fault which is proving difficult to track down. Something on the RF output side is arcing internally (nothing visible), which usually trips out the amplifier immediately, or if not badly distorts the signal. This happens on all bands regardless of antenna, even into a dummy load, and only when the amplifier has warmed up (which doesn’t take long). Using Adrian’s ‘scope we’ve checked out all the supply rails, and found no problems there. We’ll continue fault finding as time permits.
That's about all the news for now. Hope to see some of you for the AGM. Meanwhile have a great Christmas and New Year.