doing Exercise Blue Ham as a team again
It was a relief to be able to do Exercise Blue Ham again as a club, after the tumultuous interruptions of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s also the 80th anniversary of the formation of the Air Training Corps in 1941, and it’s been good to hear some familiar pre-pandemic voices as well as welcome some new future radio operators in this exercise.
This time we took part from our new location just on the outskirts of Glastonbury. We last did this as a group in March last year.
We resolved some teething troubles at the new location, which is an isolated site so we use leisure batteries and a 12V generator for power, and realised we need to reduce the power loss in the wiring, achieved by temporarily bridging another leisure battery much closer to the radio. This is a variant of the old technique of using an alarm battery floated off a lower-power mains supply to power a mobile rig, using the local battery to pick up the power surges on TX.
We benefit greatly from a much lower noise floor, we were able to give a lot more L/C and G/R signal reports. Although propagation naturally varies from one Exercise Blue Ham event to another, we have done quite a few of them, and the improvement in operating in a lower-noise environment is very noticeable, with a lot lower listener fatigue.
Chaz, G6UVO, Tony, M0JII, Simon G8DMN and Richard G7LEE covered the requirement for a Full licensee supervise operating the Club callsign MX0IOA and use the 60m band, we made nearly 60 contacts with cadet stations over the weekend. Many thanks to Petra M7PAH, Karen and Callum M7AJO for operating and support on the day! Thanks to Mike 2E0RWW for the photos.
we made 61 contacts over the two days, here is the RAFAC certificate
