Christmas came and went, and we decided that we'd discuss the Science Festival after Christmas, mainly as the big thing for the new year was all us M3s (or MW3s) getting on the air for new year - we were all busy sorting out our HF setups!
First Club Meeting was mid January 2002, I asked Ian what we were doing with regards to the PW Back Issues, as time was pressing on - "What you doing next week?", "nothing", "Fancy going down to Dorset?!", "Why not??" - another plan hatched, and a week later, both Ian and myself headed down to PW Offices in Broadstone - the full story of which is also on this site....
I had got the GB2WSF site at the back end of 2001, and so shifted the 'demo page' over to the new site, only to re-work it a week later with more information. We knew vaguely what we were doing, as we'd asked the club members what they wanted to do during our club meetings - we decided that the meeting before the AGM would be our 'big sort out' - what was done or not done then was to be final....
My other task was to sort out a webcam, which was an idea that I had come up with, not actually thinking that it would be taken on board - but when I added that if we could link the ATV to the internet, we'd be laughing - and at Llandudno we had asked permission of the RA - who said that 'so long as it was technically viable' - ATV to Video capture card - where's the hassle?
Ian continued to e-mail them for permission, but even in the final weeks - this wasn't forthcoming....
The webcam proved to be quite an interesting problem, I had e-mailed Dr Clive Cornford (who is Director of WSF) and told him what I would have considered useable for webcams, admittedly I don't really know much about webcams, I just know that Logitech make some pretty good cams, so went with that. Luckily I was also studying Cisco CCNA part-time at NEWI, and chatted with Jason, who was one of the tecchies there, as he was helping us sorting the cam out - Admittedly he came across problems with things like installers and firewalls - but everything came to in the end - all we had to do was get some software - but that came later.....
The other task for January was the promotion....I e-mailed PW, SWM, Radio Active and Radcom/GB2RS - all who mentioned us in their respective publications - and we even got the first story of the GB2RS news the week before - we'd covered all the publications we could...The organisers mentioned us in their hand-out, and we had a few mentions in the local press, and the event had also been mentioned on local radio - the promotion bandwagon was rolling.....next thing now would just be to tie all the loose ends together and work on the final 'program of events' for the day.....
February was quite busy, I e-mailed the 'big 3' (as I put it) - My mum was getting a little narked what with boxes and tubes turning up with my name on them, our study was slowly filling up....I updated the website with newer information, like how to get to NEWI - I also updated our communities page on ICNorthwales.
The webcam issue was now solved - all we needed now was some software to run our cam - something to take photos and post them to our website. I spent a few hours on the net one night searching for appropriate software - I came up with a few pieces of software - and e-mailed the results to Jason - over the next few weeks while attending my Cisco, I would get updates from Jason as to how it was going.
A lot of work was conducted via e-mail, there were a few pressing issues - the QSL card design hadn't come back after the organisers had taken it off us - Ian continued to ask where it was - luckily it came back nearer the end, and we were all quite impressed with it.....
I made a few small updates to the site - and added a countdown counter - something which I thought looked good, but possibly alerted us to how little time we had - However, I thought it looked good :)
March was crunch-time.....our first club meeting of March was the big one, this is where it was final - We'd pretty much decided what we were doing, we just needed to get any other ideas, and get everything finalised - We opted for 40M HF, VHF/UHF, ATV (although this was a bit of a problem) with UI-View and the Webcam, we'd have displays of older equipment, electronic kits built by club members, as Ian put it "I'd rather have too much than too little".
This was the final corner, everything now was just a frantic rush - I had built a second PC out of bits floating around my room, and had it running Win 3.11 and all manner of data mode software - the idea was to run that slideshow fashion. Last minute would prove a different story..... (Mainly as the Hard Drive packed in at 11pm the night before)
E-mail, texts and phone calls between myself, Ian, Glyn and other club members ensued - All sorts of last minute plans were hatched and acted on - I did a last minute sort of our promo, and made last minute additions to the main site and the WSF site....With just weeks to go I spoke to Jason about the Webcam, and offered to go in and give him a hand with the final set-up.
This done - we had to move the PC to a room, unfortunately the room we were supposed to be in was a Mac lab, full of nice new G4s for Multimedia etc - what I later discovered was that when Ian was at NEWI, all the room numbers were different, the room that I thought we were in was allocated to the room we should have been in - In the end it was all sorted, the cam was set up and was running AOK...
Ian and myself moved all his gear to the room, unfortunately we'd been denied the opportunity to sort out the antennas on the Friday - mainly as Ken Dodd was in attendance - well, that's what I was told....so we now had to be in first thing on Saturday.....I went home and tidied up the web cam page....Little did I know that FrontPage would remove the Java and cause me to run round like an idiot very early on the Saturday - but that's a story for another day.......
That all done, I packed up all the equipment I needed, and had a last look at the pages, my e-mail and anything else that needed doing. I took a look at the countdown on the WSF page - with about 11 hours to go, I switched off and went to bed, tomorrow was going to be a long day. The home straight was coming into view....
There was absolutely nothing more any of us could do, 7 months of planning, nearly 600 miles travelled, many e-mails, phone calls text messages, meetings, and time on the radio had pulled this event together, tomorrow we would know whether it had all been worth it. Now it was make-or-break.