Latest Amateur News

Secretary of Club wins Young Amateur of the Year!

Mark Shepard (M0AGQ / G7WHL ) is this years Young Amateur of the Year. Below is an aritcle from Radcom, the journal of the Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB):

The 1998 Young Amateur of the year is 17 year-old Mark Shepherd, M0AGQ/G7WHL, from Brighton. His achievement has earned him the first prize £300 cheque from the Radiocommunications Agency, together with a conducted tour around the Agency’s Radio Monitoring Centre at Baldock. He will also receive a prize from the RSGB, to be presented at the RSGB HF Convention on 11 October 1998.

The Winner
Mark has done much to raise the profile of amateur radio at his school, Brighton College. He has been the secretary of the school radio club for the past three years and has helped set up several special event and contest stations.
Patrick Billingham, G4AGQ, Head of Electronics at Brighton College, said that thanks to Mark’s efforts, "this year the number of RAE candidates (at the school) has been more than double the number that I managed to encourage in the previous ten".
Mark has been a GB2CW broadcaster since December 1996, and has run Morse practice sessions at school. He also organised RAE revision classes and plans to take this further next year, with Novice training for the junior section of the school.
    Packet is one of Mark’s favourite aspects of the hobby, and during the past two years he has spent a considerable amount of time developing and running a BBS. In a bid to promote packet locally and to provide a discussion forum, he founded the Brighton TCP/IP Group in early 1997.
    Mark has used his knowledge and interest in radio to good effect in the RAF cadet Force, which he joined in 1995. In 1997 he was promoted to Junior Corporal, and given the job of teaching cadets how to use radio effectively.

Reproduced with kind permission from the RSGB. (Radcom - October 1998)

Brighton College Amateur Radio club raises over £120 for Radio related charity

Between the 26th and 27th of September the Radio Club raised over £120 for The British Wireless for the Blind fund. Five members of the club gave up part of their weekend to make as many contacts as possible during 24 hours, worldwide using HF, and nationwide using VHF and UHF. In all over 200 contacts were made using voice and morse code (CW), with SSB and FM.

The British Wireless for the blind fund is a charity which aims to provide the comfort of a radio or radio cassette recorder to all U.K. registered blind people in need. The charity says: "A radio mean so much more to someone who is blind and lonely. It brings complete entertainment and constant companionship". It is a fact that there are nearly 167,000 people registered blind in the U.K, and 1 in 4 blind people never recieve visits from friends or relatives. The radio club is extremely proud to support such a worthwile radio realted cause, and looks forward to doing a similar event next year.

Two Members of the club complete the Post Signals Classification Course

Three members of the College Radio Club are also involved in CCF (Combined Cadet force), signals section. Two of these members recently completed their week long Post Classification Course. During the week they learnt about VHF communications including: Antenna Theory, Mobile communications, and using more sophisticated VHF radios. They both found it "An extremely fun and intresting week, in which we learnt a lot about Radios!" They both hope to go and complete the Advanced Couse this Easter, which focusses on HF communications.

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