I am sure by now that many of you will be thinking that club newsletters were a thing of the past. However, since the last AGM your committee has been experiencing a rather bumpy ride, having lost both Steve G1KWF as Treasurer due to a job relocation, and then Roy G7RVM due to illness. Until then Roy had been gallantly been covering both the post of Secretary and Treasurer. At present the committee is as follows,

N.B. I spoke to Roy on the phone recently and he is continuing to improve, I hope to be calling round to see him soon.

At a committee meeting of the Three Counties Rally, held on the 2nd of July, representatives of the six clubs involved were informed that the May rally had made just £317 profit. After a some-what lengthy discussion as to whether to call it a day, and disband the rally committee, it was decided by most, that a rally held in December may be more profitable, as rallies that time of year are few and far between. Rather than wait until December 2002 it has been decided to hold a rally on Saturday the 8th of December this year under the new title of Worcester Radio, Electronics and Computer Rally. If this rally is a success then future rallies may well be moved to December Andy G7OFC and myself will continue to represent the club.

The Hereford Radio Club have resigned from the rally due to the disappointing results at the May Rally.

The Cheltenham Amateur Radio Association has sent an open invitation to all local radio amateurs who would like to attend their next meeting on Friday 7th September at 7.30pm, when the guest speaker will be the President of the RSGB Don Beattie speaking on the "Future of Amateur Radio". For those wishing to attend, the venue and directions will be available at the August meeting of the MHRAC. Dave G4EYJ

For some years I have been talking about taking radio equipment abroad on holiday to activate "somewhere rare". However, a combination of apathy and lack of planning has prevented this. This year we booked our winter holiday further in advance than usual, which allowed me to plan a radio expedition around it. The first problem is always to find the appropriate points of contact. A few hours on the internet one cold winters weekend allowed me to find the point of contact in the Mauritius Telecommunications Authority, download the application form and exchange e-mails with a G who had been there last year and the secretary of the Mauritius amateur radio society. The e-mail address of the hotel proved a little more elusive. So 10 weeks before we were due to depart I had submitted my licence application and received permission to operate from the hotel. To cut a long saga short, my licence was approved less than 24 hours before we were due to depart. It transpired that elections in September had resulted in the first change of government since independence and slowed the decision making process.

It was my intention to carry all the radio equipment in hand baggage, which required a number of purchases. My IC706Mk2G is ideal for this. A SEC1223 switched mode power supply was obtained. This PSU is smaller and lighter than the transceiver and exceptionally clean in terms of RF emissions. The first time I tried it the TV was on in the lounge and I scared myself until I realised that the 15kHz "buzzes" across the HF bands were actually coming from the TV! I wanted to operate on a number of bands so that I could take advantage of conditions so some form of multiband antenna was needed. The final choice was a 14MHz dipole fed with 300 ohm ribbon feeder and an MFJ971 antenna tuning unit. Security at Heathrow seemed uninterested in my hand baggage!

We had to visit the capital Port Louis to collect the licence. At this point Mary was virtually offered a job as the Telecommunications Authority needed a financial controller! The antenna was erected using the hotel block and a handy palm tree as the supports. The patented BVY method of a tennis ball, a piece of cotton and some rope provided entertainment for the other guests at the hotel. Initial tuning around 20 meters produced only noise and I was convinced that the radio had not survived the journey. Looking at a great circle map, you realise that the nearest countries are two hops away and Europe is at least three. This is rather different to having loud Italians et al only one hop away. More careful listening proved that there were signals there, they were however rather weaker than expected.

I was very much in demand though it proved very difficult to get a pile up going on SSB. There were exceptions when I worked 50 JA's in 20 minutes and had to resort to working split frequency and receiving over a 10kHz range. Fortunately I had taken the Morse key and in the end over 80% of the contacts were on CW as it was far easier to attract attention on that mode. Unfortunately I do not have a CW filter on the 706 which makes extracting callsigns from major pileups rather difficult.