Exciting Start To The New Year
This was meant to be a reasonably quiet start to the year with a committee meeting just before the first meeting of the year. We propose the AGM for Saturday the 26th of March in the afternoon, the next membership year runs from April, hopefully the Covidsituation will be clearer and better from then.
The meeting went reasonably uneventfully, and just at the end then we heard a call for help on 145.475 MHz.
One of our members had done a three-point turn in the night and since it had been raining pretty much all day ended up with the back sliding into one of the rhynes a few hundred yards from the meeting. Fortunately a willow had stopped things going too far.
We had several cars at the event so we recovered the driver and passenger to Site 2 to get them warmed up and a cup of tea, nobody was hurt, and tried to pull the car out with a couple of the yellow tow-ropes from Proper Job visible on the ground. However, while these may have been OK for towing on the flat they weren’t up to the job in hand, and snapped.
Matt 2E0FNT knows many of the local farmers, it happened to be Joe’s field behind, and Joe came along with his tractor. This made short work of pulling Ed’s car out, using a chain he’d brought along. I learned from Tony M0JII that you use the wishbone arms for attachment to pull the car out from this position. So a successful recovery and the car was OK, so we drove it back to Site 2 and Ed was able to go home after the meeting.
It was a good radio operating exercise too, highlighting that with a group of people at multiple points the radio scored over point to point comms in that everyone is aware ofthe situation. There’s nothing you couldn’t have done using mobile phones but it would have been a bit more tiresome to use, with more confusing background noise unless we had used something like Zello. Multi-way conferencing is all very well but using a touch-screen mute isn’t so easy in the night when you are doing something else.
Here’s a few words from our chariman, Matt, 2E0FNT
Big thank you to everyone who saved the night tonight after a members car went into a ditch on way to club venue tonight with the power of amateur radio after a distress call was heard we had a team of members on scene to arrange help and assist. Big thank you to Mike Steve Tony Karen Richard for helping with the matter.