www.cpsarc.com

The newsletter of Cockenzie & Port Seton Amateur Radio Club

Onto another month and an-other editorial, already this is the third one for this year, my how time flies by!!!! One thing is noticeable and that the evenings are now beginning to “stretch out” and aiming away from what I call the winter dol-drums. Thank goodness for that say’s I. In some respects I like the dark nights where one can get nice and cosy sitting watch-ing the television but if I am per-fectly honest I do prefer the light nights as it allows one to get out and about instead of vegetating in front of the “box”. First of all this month I would like to pass on our deepest sympathies to the family of Vic GM4GGF who sadly passed away. Vic was certainly a char-acter and had a great sense of humour and loved nothing bet-ter than setting up a good old wind-up. He was a very knowl-edgeable person and offered great advice on some of our technical issues. Vic you will be missed so RIP. It is a difficult time for all of those concerned trying to come to terms with their grief so all we can do is be there for them and offer our sympathies. Ok then, what have we been up to this month; first of all we had our annual radio check night run

by John MM0JXI (still to happen as I write this editorial) It is a great event to put your radios through their paces so hopefully many turned up to take part. Tomorrow, 8

th March, I have 10

people sitting their Intermediate Exam and another one on the 17

th March. I am running a

Foundation Course on the 14th

& 21st March which is my last

before my sabbatical and start-ing up again in September. On behalf of us all I wish them all the best with their respective exams. I still need to arrange all the dates yet for my 2009-2010 sessions and once I have done that I will announce them via the newsletter and our website. Our next event in March is a talk by Malcolm Gibson MM0YMG on “Databases and their Uses”. I do hope many of you will make the effort to come along as I for one appreciate the amount of effort that is re-quired to put on even a 30 min-ute presentation. To the future for the 10 Pin Bowling in April (Saturday 25

th

April @20:00 Ten-Pin at Foun-tainbridge: Cost £12.50/adult £10/child) there are still plenty places if you wish to go so if you do can you please contact me direct. It is important that I get a £5 deposit per person as I

have not booked it yet as they have changed their policy i.e. you book and you pay immedi-ately and if you cancel you lose your money. Lastly, if I have any thing to say this month it is the old hobby horse of looking for newsletter input. Thanks to those who have been contributing but we need more. Lots of people inti-mate that they will but never do. I do struggle from month to month to write articles and I really genuinely could do with some help so this is a plea from the heart for articles. It would be fantastic to have a good pool of articles that John can select from. Right I think that is about it so enjoy club night and the news-letter. Bob GM4UYZ

EDITORIAL

By Bob Glasgow GM4UYZ

March 2009

Vol 17 Issue 3

www.cpsarc.com

2

Radio Test Night

By John Innes MM0JXI

The latest of my Radio Test nights was held on Friday 20 February in the Port Seton Community Centre. This is a great opportunity to have your radios put through their paces on some profes-sional test gear to which many Amateurs do not have ready access. The equipment I use is mostly borrowed from my colleagues in BT’s Radio Support Group, so thanks to them for making it available once more. The test setup consists of a Marconi 2955 Radiocomms test set which can perform many measurements from DC to 1GHz and is particularly useful testing VHF and UHF radios as it can generate and measure CTCSS tones (for repeater ac-cess etc.) It also directly meas-ures SINAD, an important indi-cator of receive sensitivity.

Next comes a spectrum ana-lyser to display transmitted sig-nals which allows us to inspect the signal for spurious transmis-sions, this instrument is con-nected to a transmitter via a Bird RF sniffer which takes a tiny sample of an RF signal at a level suitable for the very sensi-tive front end of the Spectrum Analyser. I also use a Bird 43 RF Wattme-ter with a collection of sensor elements and a dummy load to measure transmitted power at levels much higher than the 2955 test set can handle. All this equipment enables me

to perform a fairly comprehen-sive set of tests on a variety of radios, measuring output power, frequency, deviation and spec-tral purity, receive frequency and sensitivity. We had a nice variety of radios to test this year, many people brought along several pieces so there was enough equipment to fill the two hours. Everything from commercial handhelds through HF and VHF radios to 10m modified CB ‘s and modi-fied 4m packet radios. All went through the same series of tests and I was able to explain some of the testing and the use of the test gear to all who were inter-ested.

No serious faults were found throughout the evening, so eve-ryone can record in their logs that their radios have been checked. So, thanks to everyone who brought radios along to be tested and to those who sup-ported the event by coming along to watch and chat about the performance of the various radios. I hope everyone who came along found it useful and infor-mative. John MM0JXI

3

Contents 2 Radio Test Night

3 Tartan Trophy

4 Amateur Licence Training

7 Logview

8 Test Your Knowledge

9 Event Calendar

10 Experiments in the VLF Bands

12 Snippets

3

It has recently been announced that CPSARC has won the Tar-tan Trophy as the leading Scot-tish Station in the Open section at the RSGB VHF Field day. Congratulations to everyone involved, the weather was very wet that weekend so putting on a fantastic station from a hillside in Dumfries is a remarkable achievement.

The trophy will be presented at the GMDX Convention at the King Robert Hotel in Stirling on 18 April.

Contributions to the newslet-ter and web site are most welcome. Please don’t send these items to GM4UYZ, he’s busy enough doing all the other things he does for the club. Send any items you’d like included to mm0jxi@cpsarc.com or submit them direct on the web site.

Tartan Trophy

By John Innes MM0JXI

www.cpsarc.com

4

There have been many things said about what we now term the new licencing structure. It has certainly taken a good num-ber of years to what I deem, “the new structure” being ac-cepted although there are still some issues happening out there. I think it is important to recognise that what happened say 30 years ago is no longer applicable. Any one wanting to obtain a licence now must go through all the steps i.e. Foun-dation then the Intermediate and then the Advanced even though they might be the most technical person around and could for example take an Ad-vanced Licence now and easily pass it. It was like when I took my licence back in 1983 it was multiple choices and it was two separate papers then I had to pass a Morse test at 12WPM to get my full licence. If I had de-cided to sit my RAE when I was at the Leith Nautical College back in 1968 to 1970 it would have been a written exam. The point is “life changes” and we need to accept the present structure whether we agree with it or not. My involvement in delivering training happened when the Novice Licence appeared. The novice licence was the start of the breakdown of the old struc-ture and was designed to en-courage new blood into the hobby at a time when amateur radio licensees were reducing. It offered a Class A or B licence identical to the then current Full licence structure of Class A and Class B. To move between classes it still required a pass of 12WPM CW. The novice pass as much as it allowed a pass was very re-stricted on what was available to you, for example only 3W RF output and most of HF but no 10M for those who passed the “A” Novice and for the “B” Nov-

ice the same power but limited to only 70cms. This lasted for a while before further changes were made to the licence struc-ture in that more power became available the 12WPM was dropped to 5WPM, this included the Full “B” licence as well. On the training front I started delivering the course in 1994 aiming for the March 1995 exam. I ran the training course over 12 Sunday afternoons in my garage and this continued up to the December 2001 exam. One of the reasons of using my garage meant that I could keep the cost down to that of the ac-tual exam fees which I feel was a major bonus. Now I would do it totally differently but then I have learnt a heck of a lot since those early days. The maximum number of pupils that I could accommodate was 4 at a time so it was not the ideal scenario. I must admit when I look back it certainly gave us a nice cosy environment especially when the heaters went on!!!!! My first pupils were Barbara Scott, Susan Smith and Calum Clark and glad to say they all passed. In total I taught 26 people the Novice Licence of which 24 passed, 1 failed and 1 didn’t turn up for the exam. To be honest I felt proud of my success rate and it is even more heartening that some of them have gone on and ob-tained their Full Licence. In 2002, the licence structure within the UK moved to its cur-rent set-up i.e. the Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced Licences. I then decided that I would like to continue delivering training the Foundation Licence so I had to apply to become an official instructor, and administrator. I also had to find a location that would conform to all the require-

ments for sitting exams the rea-son being that with this new structure it had moved from the control of the City & Guilds to the Radiocommunications Agency (now OFCOM) and the RSGB. The responsibility to administer all the paperwork and setting of the exams which had now been moved to being “Examination on Demand” now was being done by the RSGB. This struc-ture still remains in place today. The location I identified that met all the exam requirements was our local community centre so it was duly registered. In my eyes, the beauty of the current structure is that it allows someone to progress easily through the different licences even if they have absolutely no technical knowledge at all. When I studied for my RAE I had the advantage that I had studied Radio at the Leith Nauti-cal College as I had intended to be a Marine Radio Officer. The problem that I observed away back in 1983 was that many had not even grasped the basic terminology and were get-ting hit with deep technical terms. A classic example that I can remember is when we were doing transmitters. The subject came to SSB and immediately the instructor was talking about balanced mixers and filters. I certainly was asking questions and when we stopped for a cup of tea lots of those on the course said “thank goodness” you’re asking questions as we don’t even understand what the term SSB means. What I am trying to illustrate is that it was taking the subject right into the “deep end” without understanding the basics. This new structure offers a solu-tion to this problem. The foundation covers all the basics in each of the subject

(Continued on page 5)

Amateur Licence Training

By Bob Glasgow GM4UYZ

5

matters it covers so in essence you learn the terms without be-ing overwhelmed with the “nitty gritty”. The Intermediate takes the same subjects and delves a bit deeper into it. The Advanced and final exam takes again the same subjects and deals in depth with them. The advantage now for the pupil is that they know the basics and therefore can concentrate on the in depth material. With re-gard to the exams the Founda-tion and Intermediate are de-signed on remembering facts and the Advanced is more about manipulating those facts. A common comment for all the pupils who have done all three courses with me is that there is a massive jump from the Inter-mediate to the Advance. They agree with me that with the Ad-vanced it is not just about the Saturdays doing the training it is about all the extra study that is required to be done. On the training front, I made the decision that I wanted to deliver the training over 2 Saturdays with the exam to be taken on the second Saturday and I have continued this format ever since. The other major decision was to move the course onto Power-Point which allowed me to pro-duce a format that I could use time after time plus if there were any changes then they could be added or deleted as required. I hasten to add there have been many!!!! The other advantage is that it ensured that I covered every aspect of the laid down syllabus for the licence which meant I could pass on all the informa-tion to all the pupils knowing that I had not missed anything. At that time when I started the Foundation training we had the use of the Yacht Club Premises at Prestonpans where I ran 7 courses with the exams being held in the Port Seton Commu-nity Centre. Again this venue, like my ga-

(Continued from page 4) rage, imposed a restriction on how many pupils could attend a course with the number being limited to 4. In the April of 2003 our relationship ended very abruptly with the Yacht Club, another story as they say and we started using the Port Seton Community Centre. This situa-tion has stayed the same ever since and I must admit that over the years I cannot praise the Community staff enough for all the help that have given us. As part of the training there is a practical on the air session which I must thank Tom GM4LRU for being available 99% of the time to help carry out this task to the other 1% when Tom has not been avail-able other club members have stepped in and helped so a thanks goes out to them as well. In total 128 people have sat the Foundation exam (to January 2009) and there has been a total of 120 passes which gives a 94% pass rate. It is great to see that many of these have also came back and attended my Intermediate and Advanced courses and passed. It just proves that people do not sit back and stop at the Foundation Exam. I started delivering the Interme-diate Course back in 2004 run-ning it over a period of 5 Satur-days with the exam taking place on the last Saturday. This course, apart from an ex-pansion on the theory learned on the Foundation Course is geared towards practical. Pupils learn the art of soldering and even build a small kit. The satisfaction that this gives when it is successfully is unbeliev-able. They also learn to use meters to measure resistance, voltage and current. From measurements taken power is proved along with ohm’s law. Just about everyone who has done this course thoroughly enjoys it and says it is the best one out of the three, I think it is the practical that does it. In total 58 people have completed this course (this

does not include the 11 people who are studying this at the mo-ment) with 57 passes and one person who didn’t turn up for the exam. Overall it gives a 98% pass rate which I am really pleased with. The Advanced, well this is where the real work starts. This is definitely not about the 8 Saturdays but going that extra mile and really studying. With the Advanced, something I started with the Intermediate Licence, there is plenty of homework to help encourage this study. It has been proven that if you do not study then your chance of passing is really well reduced. It is a massive step up and it is something all the pupils I have had make comment about. From 2001 up to May 2006 all we provided was an exam cen-tre and exam invigilating with a total of 21 people self studying and taking the exam.14 passed which gave a 66% pass rate. By this time I had made up my mind to start teaching the ad-vanced course so went about producing a course. No matter what course it is, something I had not appreciated until I started delivering training was the time required to actually produce a course. The Advanced took me well over 6 months to produce it so that gives you an idea of the sort of timescales. Even today, I am continually tweaking the courses to try and help get the important points across. Since October 2006 I have ran 4 advanced courses with 20 candidates plus another 6 addi-tional people who self studied. Of the 20 people who took the course 15 passed first time and the other 5 passed on a re-sit. Of the 6 self study people 3 passed first times, 1 re-sat the exam and passed and the other 2 have never re-sat the exam.

(Continued on page 6)

www.cpsarc.com

6

You can see the difference right away with the percentage pass-ing that it is harder and defi-nitely needs the study factor. For all the training I am respon-sible for the Training and Ad-ministration, lots to do I can I can assure you of that but I must thank Cambell MM0DXC who has helped me enormously 98% of the Saturdays and cer-tainly between us we have made the training fun.

(Continued from page 5) As well as being there on a Sat-urday his main role is that of Lead Invigilator and he has done it from the very first course, Ron GM4IKU was the second invigilator who did it for a number of years before he decided he had done enough. This role is now presently being carried out by Gary MM0FZV and others who have stepped in as and when required. Overall we are a TEAM with a single aim to encourage, teach and help people get through their exams to get that elusive pass.

For those of you who maybe reading this I hope you all en-joyed the experience and are now enjoying the fruits of your labours and enjoying this great hobby of ours P AMATEUR RADIO Bob GM4UYZ

Some photo’s from Brian M0RNR’s 40th Birthday Party at HMS Calliope in Newcastle. Congratulations Brian, hope your hangover is better now!

7

I came across the following pro-gram and thought I would have a look at it. Below is some infor-mation about the program and I suppose its deficiency that it can only do this for W/VE i.e. USA and Canada. The reason that this is the case is that the US and Canada make their Full Licence database available and other countries do not. I must admit I found it quite interesting to see where all the stations that were worked during 2008 CQWW SSB were located. Re-gard actually using the program it was really simple so not worth actually telling you how to do it. It does require a CABRILLO file from a contest and it does need the Longitude and Latitude of your station and that is it.

2008 CQWW SSB – GM2T The screen shot below shows all the US and Canadian con-tacts we made Each contact is labelled and coloured which corresponds to the Band that they were worked on. You can single step through the contacts seeing when you actually made them. Working from an online data-base of about 970,000 W/VE callsigns past and present, Log-View plots the QSO’s in a Cabrillo-format contest-log on to one of 8 different maps of North America. Essentially a post-contest log-visualisation tool for analysing contest performance, LogView is also useful in defining gaps in your antenna coverage, by comparing the positions of en-trants to the contest against those entrants actually con-tacted. You can step through the log manually, or animate the con-test at a range of speeds and watch QSO’s build up in the order that you made them. Each

Logview

By Bob Glasgow GM4UYZ

spot can be annotated with a callsign-label, and you can keep a running check of Multipliers worked, position - distance - bearing information for each QSO, and a variety of other in-formation, whilst choosing which bands are currently dis-played. All the maps you create can be saved for offline viewing and detailed future analysis - full details on the website. The following contests are sup-ported by LogView: ARRL-10 ARRL-160 ARRL-DX-CW ARRL-DX-SSB ARRL-RTTY ARRL-SS-CW ARRL-SS-SSB ARRL-VHF-JAN ARRL-VHF-JUN ARRL-VHF-SEP ARRL-UHF-AUG CQ-160-CW CQ-160-SSB CQ-WPX-CW CQ-WPX-RTTY CQ-WPX-SSB CQ-VHF CQ-WW-CW CQ-WW-RTTY CQ-WW-SSB IARU-HF NAQP-CW NAQP-RTTY NAQP-SSB RSGB-IOTA STEW-PERRY TARA-RTTY LogView also has a separate, dedicated Results-Viewer, that

lets you create a map of the published contest results for any one of over 120 different contests, and compare them to the results of other contests in the database. To start using LogView on your own contest logs, visit: http://www.mapability.com/ei8ic/logview 73s Tim Makins EI8IC Contester Tips and Resources, Ham Map Heaven. http://www.mapability.com/ei8ic It is a shame that there is not the same type of information available around the world as it really would be fascinating to see where all the stations were located, especially after a con-test like CQWW. Who knows it may appear in the future. Al-though it is limited to the US and Canada I still found it fasci-nating. Bob GM4UYZ

www.cpsarc.com

8

1. QRN means a. What is my signal strength? b. Are my signals fading? c. Interference from other stations? d. Interference from atmospherics?

2. Which one of the following is MOST likely

to be effective under poor propagation conditions? a. CW b. SSB c. FM d. SSTV

3. To receive QSL cards from the QSL bu-

reau, it is necessary to a. Send stamp self addressed envelopes

to the sub-manager for your call sign series

b. Advise the distant amateur of your home address

c. Be a member of the RSGB d. Add ‘/Q’ to your call sign when operat-

ing on HF 4. Amateur satellites orbit Earth at a height

above a. 25km b. 50km c. 75km d. 150km

5. The use of a soldering iron stand reduces

the risk of a. The iron cooling down b. The iron element burning out c. A fire starting d. Loss of solder

6. A risk when drilling is a. The centre punch will mark the work b. Swarf will fly up towards the eyes c. An electric shock may occur d. The drill bit will become blunt

7. A ladder should always be

a. Used only when vertical b. Set at an angle of 45 degrees c. Inspected for damage after it has been

used d. Secured at the top or held at the bottom

8. A Residual Current Device (RCD)

a. Gives better protection than a fused system

b. Does not protect as well as a fused sys-tem

c. Helps to conserve electricity d. Reduces the possibility of mains borne

TVI 9. The purpose of the flux found in cored sol-

ders is to a. Form a protective coating over the com-

pleted joint b. Cool the solder so that it sets quickly c. Help the solder to flow over the sur-

faces to be joined d. Prevent corrosion of the soldering iron

bit

10. What is the value of a resistor coloured green, green, gold

a. 5.5R b. 55R c. 555R d. 5k5R

Test Your Knowledge

By Bob Glasgow GM4UYZ

9

Event Calendar

By John Innes MM0JXI

6 March 2009 Club Night

7 March 2009 Intermediate Exam

14 March 2009 Foundation Course

20 March 2009 Talk by Malcolm Gibson 2M0BNY—Databases and their uses

21 March 2009 Foundation Exam

28 March 2009 Newsletter Deadline

3rd April 2009 Club Night

5 April 2009 Blackpool Rally (note change of date)

25 April 2009 10 Pin Bowling Night at Fountainbridge £12.50 adult / £10 child (£5 non-returnable deposit)

25 April 2009 Newsletter Deadline

1 May 2009 Club Night

8 May 2009 1st 144MHz DF Hunt

16 / 17 May 2009 Scottish Parliament Special Event GB10SP

23 May 2009 Newsletter Deadline (early due to holidays)

5 June 2009 Club Night

6 June 2009 Port Seton Gala Day

14 June 2009 PW QRP Contest

20 June 2009 Museums On The Air Weekend from Museum of Flight GB2MOF

20 June 2009 Newsletter Deadline (early due to July club night being early)

26 June 2009 Club Night (note change of night due to VHF Field Day)

4 July 2009 RSGB VHF Field Day

25/26 July 2009 RSGB IOTA Contest

25 July 2009 Newsletter Deadline

7 August 2009 Club Night

14 August 2009 Junk Night

15 August 2009 Lighthouses Weekend from Barns Ness GB2LBN

22 August 2009 Newsletter Deadline (early due to holidays)

4 September 2009 Club Night

25 September 2009 2nd 144MHz DF Hunt

26 September 2009 Newsletter Deadline

02 October 2009 Club Night

04 October 2009 RSGB 21/28MHz Contest

16 October 2009 Video Night

www.cpsarc.com

10

Experiments in the VLF Bands

By Geoff Crowley MM5AHO

Experiments in the VLF Bands. During this winter I think I must have become bored, as I seem to have experimented more in alternatives to my normal radio fare than for many years. This time it was with LF. Know-ing that we now have a 137kHz band, and that some NOVs have been issued for 500kHz, I thought I’d like to have a listen around and see whats there, who is doing what, and if my gear could hear anything. A bit of reading on the internet suggested that most Ham trans-ceivers are a bit deaf below 1600kHz, so it might be a chal-lenge. My IC756P3 doesn’t seem so bad though, and I can hear some quite weak and dis-tant MW broadcast stations, including the Faeroe Islands at the low end of the band about 530kHz. I had recently made a loop an-tenna in order to direction find a problem that I seem to suffer occasionally from the Wester-glen transmitter site near Pol-mont. (That’s another story for another day). The loop, is about a metre each side in a diamond square pat-tern. (see fig 1)

Fig 1, loop antenna. The loop was originally wound for the MW band, and specifi-cally for about 1000 kHz. To make it more useful for 500 kHz it needed a few more turns. This type of loop is a resonant circuit

(remember those from your Ra-dio exams?), being an inductor and a capacitor, with a single turn loop to collect the signal and send it to the RX. In this case there are 12 turns on the loop to form the inductor, con-nected to a capacitor. In the picture (fig 1) above you can see the round knob for the ca-pacitor a little up from the bot-tom of the loop where you can see the coax plug with red tape on the coax. Getting the inductance and ca-pacitance just right causes the 12turn loop to be resonant on the desired frequency, and the single turn loop, which is con-nected to the socket where the coax is attached, transfers that signal to the receiver. The loop is very directional. Align the crossarms with the direction from which the signal is expected and it comes up out of the noise. Turn the loop only about 5 degrees and the signal disappears. Its easy to get a signal at S9+40 strength to null right down to not moving the S meter. This means 2 signals very close in frequency, but from different directions can be discriminated from each other quite easily. In Yagi terms, you could say its similar to the direc-tivity of about a 15 – 20 element beam. So having got the loop sorted out and primed for 500 kHz, what about my receiver? Many people use an upconverter to explore the VLF bands. This is simply a mixer that mixes the received frequency with an os-cillator (say 10 MHz) and you get the signal out at Freq + os-cillator. In my case I made one to operate at 10 MHz as I had a crystal at that freq. I’d found a circuit diagram in an advert for a converter, and decided to copy it. You can buy these, Datong made a good one some years back and you still find them sold

at rallies and junk sales. Searching about in my junk shed, I found the partsP

Fig 2 Junk box treasures. Except I needed a mixer. Where would I find oneP?

Fig 3. Robbing old boards for parts. This is where I get to advise you to NEVER throw anything away. I’ve had this board since about 1993. It was a kit I made up for an FM receiver for 2m. But there on this board, not used for 15 years is just the chip I needed.

Fig 4 Board made, now to find an enclosure. My construction technique is a bit rough as you can see here. And my planning the layout and enclosure are even more lack-ing.

11

Fig 5. Completed converter (without lid) After mounting it all in the box, it didn’t look too bad – until I tried to fit the lid. That voltage regula-tor chip (black device top right) stands too high, and I had to drill a hole in the lid to get it to fit. But it works. I tune to 10.000 MHz, and thats me listening on 0.00 kHz. Tune up a bit and I hear 60 kHz radio clock signals at about S9+20dB. A bit more and there’s various data sig-nals. I haven’t heard any ama-teur signals that I recognise as such at 137kHz yet, but at 500 kHz I have heard many signals. Best DX is OH Finland, but that’s not even a week of listen-ing as I write this. There’s a variety of interesting software on the internet. One I’ve been using is called ARGO. It displays the received audio on a waterfall type display, and on the image below you can see two signals in the main stream, both clearly CW and along with hearing it, reading these is eas-ier than it looks on screen here. Some amateurs use slow morse. Now I don’t mean slow like I do (10wpm is fast for me), but slow as in snails pace. It’s called QRSS. (Remember that QRS is Q code for slow, the extra S means extra Slow!). The

slowest commonly used is 120 seconds per dash. Yes, that means the dash is 120 seconds long. So, you can’t really read this by ear, and it doesn’t matter too much about fading, but you can read it off the screen. You won’t see much of a ragchew at this speed. All you’ll get is a callsign, perhaps repeated, and maybe “test” or something simi-lar. So, what can be heard on the spectrum below the MW band? There’s actually a lot, and most of normally hidden from our ears. But for the sake of a few hours cobbling together an an-tenna, a converter and it all springs forth. Time signals, data, two Amateur bands, NAVTEX, and a whole host of natural phenomena

you’d never expect. Spherics, tweaks, whistlers to name a few of these unusual creatures of the night! And is there activity? I sub-scribed for an hour or two to a LF reflector. That’s an email based thing where you get for-warded all the emails between similarly minded bods. I got 156 emails in half an hour! I rapidly unsubscribed before I got lost and submerged in incoming skeds, reports, notes on new circuits etc etc. And all on VLF stuff. I now use the UK VLF time signals to synchronise my PC clock and can get it to within .01 of a second correct. Doesn’t stay there long mind, but for a while its spot on. Have I whetted your appetite? I hope so! Go on, try something new. Discover yet again just how diverse our hobby is. Geoff MM5AHO Fig 6 screen shot of ARGO soft-ware.

www.cpsarc.com

12

The Cockenzie & Port Seton Amateur Radio Club is affiliated to the Radio Society of Great Britain and holds the call signs MM0CPS and GM2T which are used for our special event and

contest entries.

We have our own internet domain www.cpsarc.com where you will find our popular web site which features lively discussion forums and photo galleries.

You can also download an electronic copy of this newsletter.

The Club was formed by Bob Glasgow GM4UYZ in 1984, to help the local amateurs get to know each other.

Far from being just a local club we have members regularly attending from the Borders, Dumfries, Strathclyde, Fife and Newcastle.

The Club meets on the first Friday of every month (Second Friday of January) in the lounge of the Thorntree Inn on the old Cockenzie High Street from 7pm till late.

The Club is run in a very informal way, just a group of like minded people doing something they enjoy!

This does not mean that we don’t do anything, we enter (and win!) contests, train newcomers, hold talks and video nights and run a popular annual Junk Sale. Our newsletter has won the Practical Wireless ‘Spotlight’ competition on several occasions.

The Club supports the British Heart Foundation in memory of a member who died from heart disease by donating the profits from some of the events we hold, we have raised over £14,368 since 1994.

Bob Glasgow 7 Castle Terrace Port Seton East Lothian EH32 0EE Phone: 01875 811723 E-mail: gm4uyz@cpsarc.com General correspondence, training and Contest entries Bob Glasgow gm4uyz@cpsarc.com HF Contests Cambell Stevenson mm0dxc@aol.com VHF Contests John MacLean mm0ccc@cpsarc.com Newsletter, website, event calendar John Innes mm0jxi@cpsarc.com

Club Sked The Club Sked has been run-ning for a couple of months now and is proving very popular, it’s driving several people to put up aerials and others to try a bit of operating, all very encouraging. 80m is proving to be quite diffi-cult at times but the wide geo-graphic spread of members means we are a bit limited in choice of bands. If you’d like to join in, keep an eye on the website chat box for the sked frequency. Thanks are due to Cambell MM0DXC for acting as sked controller and doing so much to encourage others to get on the air cpsarc.com email addresses If any club member wants an email address in the form call-sign@cpsarc.com please let mm0jxi@cpsarc.com know and I’ll set it up. Those who had these email addresses previously will also have to request them again as the old system isn’t connected to the new one. Amazon Shop The Club has an Amazon affili-ate and earns money from re-ferral fees for any Amazon pur-chases made through the links and banners on the website. So you can get Amazon’s great prices and service and help the Club out.

Snippets Information

Contacts

Answers from “Test Your Knowledge”. 1D, 2A, 3A, 4D, 5C, 6B, 7D, 8A, 9C, 10A

Supported by BT Community Champions