Camb-Hams

Easter Monday – April 13th, 2009 (by M1BXF)

Today the Cambridge boys got together and started to sort out bits ready to pack up and load up the trailer and cars tomorrow. The spiderbeam came down and dismantled OK but we had to think about how best to keep the wire/string elements in an untangled and orderly state, step up food bags… The new for the dx’pedition 17 element 2m F9FT beam was still in its box so we had to open that to check all parts were there! There aren’t many hardware radio stores, never mind ham radio outlets on the island so we thought we best check before we left. We put the the elements onto the beam to help speed up assembly when we get to the island and checked we had all the brackets and fixings, check. The 4m/6m jaybeam is down and in bits ready to go, all the ropes, guy stakes, pegs, cable ties, duct tape (can’t forget the duct tape) and brackets are in one place ready to go into the trailer too.

(Voi next to the Camb-Hams trailer)

Rob M0VFC appeared after the hard labour of the afternoon but soon got his laptop out and made up for it by writing PHP/HTML code to allow us to display the dx’pedition HRD logbook ‘live’ on our webpage! This is a feature of the new HRD logbook which is still in alpha testing. We should manage to update the online log around every 15 minutes which will allow searches by callsign, date, band, mode and Camb-Hams operator.

Rob also handed over the bandpass filters for 80m, 40m, 20m and 15m. A quick check on the miniVNA shows them to be good for each band! Well done Rob (and your dad, G3VFC)! I’ll try and post the plots of them tomorrow if I have time after packing the trailer.

(The 80m bandpass filter)