Railways on the Air 2019
21st – 22nd September
Railways on the Air from Great Central Railway Nottingham, the final special event of the year and one we always look forward in doing.
Saturday began with a good start erecting the frame tent next to the ticket office as we did in the previous year. We have joked about resistor colour coding the sections of the poles and on the plan putting the values just for a laugh but in fairness we managed to set up in record time for a change.
We strapped the tri-band collinear and the centre of the trapped dipole to the telescopic mast, then to the frame of the ticket office.
Both ends of the dipole stretched out to the fences one support by another telescopic mast the other sloping down.
Equipment was then set up we had the Yaseu FT-991 set up for HF telephony and for FT8 working on 80/40/20m. On the other side of the tent the set up was on FT-100D for the 2m setup.
The contacts made on the Saturday, were quite lacking on voice but we did manage quite a few in the log on FT8, but the Sunday was far greater. We seem to find that Sundays are always our better days for operating.
Ron had his first go on HF on the Saturday which was quite encouraging and hopefully he will have the bug to working more stations on HF in 2020 on the event stations.
The WX on the Saturday was excellent and only got a little chilly towards the end of the day, it’s a shame we couldn’t say that about the Sunday.
Sunday started off to be overcast with slight drizzle until lunch time but after that the heavens opened and major movement of power cables and extensions needed to moved in record time. It even got to the point we were even joking about operating for inland waterways.
Made it interesting in the packing away and the logistics of where the wet canvas was going. Richard took up the challenge and took back to his QTH and stretched it out in his garage to dry out before bringing back to the shack. All in all despite the poor WX we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and look forward to next year.
Our special thanks go out to Great Central Railway Nottingham for allowing us to participate in ROTA from this location.
Operators
Peter – G6KUI
Paul - G1SGZ
Richard – M0PUR
Stefan – M0OSL
Connor – 2E0EIY
Derry – 2E0RRF
Ron – 2E0FBT
