Exercise Blue Ham
It’s been three years since we last did Exercise Blue Ham. RAFAC changed to a weeklong format after 2022 which didn’t really work for us as a club, it’s good to be back as a weekend two-day format. Another lovely sunny day. We improved the antenna using flexweave on a kevlar core this time, compared to using electric fence wire, we put this up earlier in the week.
A good start in the morning, and the weather was marvellous for March. The Cadet stations were using a variety of rigs and antennas. There seemed fewer cadet stations on air than in 2022, but enough to keep us busy.
On the Sunday we tried the Blue Ham Ice Breaker exercise, described as
Ice Breaker
To avoid repeating the exchange of basic station information during subsequent or potentially multiple contacts with the same Cadet Callsign during Exercise Blue Ham, We have added Phase Two – Ice Breaker, which is a simple exchange of What 3 Words information.
MESSAGE PREPARATION
If Amateur stations are willing to take part in Ice Breaker, stations will use the What 3 Words App, https://what3words.com to create and decode a three word message.
For example a message offer may take the form: What is located at, recall.report.dated
And the reply could be: Located at, Recall Report Dated, is the Edinburgh Spitfire Memorial.
Cadet or Amateur station may initiate the exchange of Ice Breaker messages.
Congratulations to MRE30 for a smooth operation of Icebreaker both ways. Not too many stations operated this, we used a laptop because using a phone keyboard would be fraught and error-prone ;) these are surprisingly long words to spell out using alpha..zulu.
We sent MRE30 the words for Stonehenge and they sent us the three words for Notre Dame in Paris. On a second exchange with MRE 30 they sent us the code for Pen Y Fan mountain and we sent them the code for the Louvre pyramid.
Thanks to everybody involved for a great result, and of course thanks to RAFAC and the cadet stations on the air! The Blue Ham team have more information, and (in March/April) you can see us in their log1.
The 60m band channels extend from 5.2785MHz to 5.4035 MHz, SWR remained less than 1.832 across the band with the dipole about 5m a.g.l. oriented NS