Thinking day on the air - Saturday 16^th February 2002

This event is being organised for the St Joseph's Brownie pack and will be held in the school hall at St Joseph's Primary school, Newtown Road, Malvern Link, with the special event call sign GB0SJB. Likely start 9am and on the air at 10:30 am. Volunteers needed - please contact Dave G4EYJ.

Brian Miller has generously offered his garden for a Club barbecue, combined with Amateur Radio operating - good potential for antennas. Planning is at a very early stage, an early September weekend, members + wives/partners, more info as it becomes available.

My first task as your elected treasurer is to ask for your 2002 subscription. The committee have determined that the subscription for this year can remain at £10 being made up of £8 membership of "Malvern Town Club" and £2 towards club funds.

By virtue of changes to the committee we are late in deciding the subscription rate and paying the Town Club memberships. Could I ask you please to forward a cheque for £10 payable to "Malvern Hills Radio Amateur's Club" to the address below a.s.a.p. or to make payment to Mike Allenson (secretary) at the next club night - Feb 12^th .

Nick - G1PHZ (Nick Silverthorne, 161 Newtown Rd., Malvern, Worcs, WR14 1PJ)

At a recent club meeting there was a discussion on ways to increase membership and the idea of searching the CD version of the call book to generate a mailing list came up. The result of the search is summarised below.

Local amateurs are much thicker on the ground than I had imagined - and quite well hidden, possibly many are inactive but reluctant to give up their hard won licence.

Sadly the Worcester Rally is no more. A meeting was held on 14^th January attended by representatives from the Bromsgrove, Redditch, Droitwich, and Malvern Clubs and M.S.V. Raynet to discuss the viability of a Rally in December 2002. Clubs had been asked to come with a prepared position, in the event only Redditch remained in favour of holding the Rally. Small profits and increasing costs were the underlying reason for the lack of club support. and no one could see a significant prospect of the situation improving. A domino effect operated, as more clubs pulled out the potential work load and financial risk for the remaining clubs escalated to unacceptable levels.

At the 8^th January meeting it was agreed to use e-mail as far as possible to distribute the newsletter and other correspondence. Normal postal distribution is of course available to anybody who prefers or who doesn't have e-mail. The January meeting also brought up the idea of some form of club forum on the internet or via e-mail and its possible use to set up club contact scheds on say 145.425 MHz.

The mark 1 version of this scheme is simply a list of 2001 members and a few previous members which is distributed with this newsletter. This has all the e-mail addresses your dutiful secretary has managed to collect, please let me know of any additions and I will update it periodically, alternatively just e-mail the new data to the group and let it grow automatically as we add to our address books. Bob G7WIG is looking at the possibility of setting up a more advanced version using a group facility on Yahoo.

The news letter would be much more interesting if it was filled with your contributions, articles, hints and tips, a description of something nifty that you’ve just made, sales and wants adverts. I can type it up whatever form it comes in, be it MS Word, longhand, tablets of stone or even CW at a pinch, so how about it.

I find the web an invaluable source of radio related technical data, often you find the most useful stuff almost by accident. This corner of the news letter is by way of an experiment to share the good info that we may collectively find. I'll start it off with a few of my favourites, please share yours in future editions or share them quickly through the e-mail group and I'll collect them up for each newsletter.

Use for frequencies up to 22 kHz.

Up to 22 kHz. - store , display print and process waveforms. Download - freeview sound.

73s

Mike G3TGD