Hands-On Morse
There were a few hands-on displays for morse in the room - and some people really had the knack, their morse was astoundingly good ! - Admittedly I'm no Morse expert myself, but speaking to the members, this is the verdict....
The Morse display that Malcolm had set up seemed to be the most popular, mainly people could see what they were sending - People were going between Geoff's table and Malcolm's display.
We'd all started to calm down now, the last few hours had seen some quite frenetic activity - One or two of us disappeared off for a coffee, I happened to have been brought one :) - Just tried not to spill it down my white t-shirt, which Ian had printed up with the club logos, callsign's, and the Special Event details.
(Geoff guides a youngster through the morse)
Admittedly I can only really give opinion on the radio side of things from the VHF side - as the HF Station was over the other side of the room, and once or twice I couldn't see the HF station, and they probably couldn't see me, either !
I had decided to flick round 2M, going between 30W on FM, and 50W on SSB, I managed to make 2 contacts on SSB - but other than working people in the backpacker contests on Moel Fammau, this was the most 2M SSB I had ever done! - I did spend a lot of time shouting on S20, or through local repeaters (which I'd tried not to do) - however the bullet had to be bit, simplex contacts were few and far between.
One amateur had commented "Its 11:30am on a Saturday, how many amateurs are up and capable of switching their rigs on at this moment!" That just about sums things up.
However, looking at the logs, it seems that HF was quite busy for most of the day, they managed to work somehere in the region of 25 M3s ! - All they did was park up on a frequency and it all seemed to go from there, admittedly we'd used the DX-Cluster a bit, but
Afternoon
The webcam was running - and given that the PC refused to see my Zip disks, I
had to switch off the archiving, as I didn't know how much space we had to play
with - but I thought I'd switch it on for the last few hours, and email myself
the pics - a bit of a shame really, however these things happen.
The Afternoon was where it went slowly for me, I did spend a lot of time talking to people though...However - I decided to go for lunch at about 1pm, and left the 100 running to cool it down - I made my way along to the specially prepared exhibitors lounge, and helped myself to sandwiches, crisps and coffee. When I came back some 30 minutes (After giving away answers to the Mensa quiz!) later Ian was sat in the corner, along with Malcolm, John, Simon and Steve (STE) - there wasn't a single member of the public in the room!
(The Scene, not long before I went to lunch)
We used this brief break in numbers as an opportunity to go and get a coffee, have a quick tidy up, and breathe, in case we'd forgotten how to do this :) - However we thought that our luck had run out, that our constant stream of people had suddenly stopped, this wouldn't be for long.
The afternoon continued ever onwards..... Someone managed to reset the web cam PC (note to self - hide it next year!) - that was back up and running within minutes....
We continued to work HF and 2M, and HF seemed to be doing quite well, Glyn had taken a break, and in the hot-seat was Stephen (MW1STE/MW3SMF) - Who managed to work the best DX - He worked a Dutch station - however, If you want to be picky, the webcam was the best DX.....
Wrexham --->California---->Wrexham - but who's being picky ???? - We'd also worked Belgium that afternoon, but as I say, we weren't out to set or break records...
A Few pictures from the Webcam, showing the calm before the storm, It was very busy for the last hour !
We got a bit busy again about 3pm, but there was so much noise in the room, I could hardly hear anything - the speaker on the 100 is no bigger than a £2 coin - Ian loaned me a set of headphones, which helped so long as I was careful about the volume, as there's no headphone socket on the TX, and the External Speaker socket needs some sort of attenuator on the socket if used with 'phones...
We were joined by Liz Cabban and Dave Evans (Our RLO and Deputy RLO Respectively) - who helped out and mucked in by talking to the sudden influx of people that had suddenly appeared - and here was us thinking we were going to have an easy afternoon! - I put a few mentions out on the DX-Cluster, something that we'd done quite successfully over the course of the day, but we figured a few mentions to help us in these last few hours wouldn't go amiss!
Although we weren't a contest station, We figured that use of the DX-Cluster would help the event, plus the website (which notched up 40 visitors in that time!) - At least it made the web cam all the more worthwhile.....
I managed a few more contacts on 2M, but spent more time talking on the other side of the microphone, I had pretty much finished on 2M, last contact (looking at the logs) was 1523 to G0SJS, although I kept calling on S20, and through local repeaters. The last few hours went quite quickly, we seemed to have this mass of people at one point, it was easier to stay sat down!
4pm until 5pm was quite busy, We were somewhat surprised, we hadn't quite expected it to be as busy as it was!
From there on in, we kept going until almost 5pm, Glyn and Geoff were back on the HF for the final leg at 4pm and kept going until 5pm, we were literally packing up around them, we'd started switching off and packing up about 4:30 - but they were still on the air - they'd also managed to find someone who wasn't too shy to talk on the air, and was supervising them in their first jaunt on amateur radio.
As we packed up, I commented that whoever wanted the Icom/Kenwood posters & leaflets should do so now, as I wasn't taking them home ! (correction - I wasn't allowed to !) - a mad dash ensued, someone has the World Map (with prefixes) that Kenwood kindly sent us :) - I have an Icom sticker ! - We gave Liz all 600 or so of our RSGB leaflets, she seemed quite happy with them !
The big question - Will we do it again next year??? - Yes, and it will be bigger, and better than ever before !