This is a notice to all memebers of both the Radio & Computer sections of the Cornish Radio Amateur Club.

April is of course Annual General Meeting time and, this year, the main meeting night on the 1st Wednesday is examination night for our latest batch of 6 aspirants to Foundation licence level and this will take place at the Perran Ar worthal Church Hall, our registered examination centre.

We have taken this as an opportuniuty to test drive a potential alternative venue to give as many members as possible to come along and and voice their opinion on the suitability of the venue.

The meeting will therefore be held on the first Thursday of April at tjhe former primary school at School Lane, Gweal An Top, Redruth. School lane is opposite MY Motors and runs from there to the portion of Sandy Lane that runs between the two sets of roundabouts.

Ample on site parking on tarmac is available and you will not need a torch to find the way back to your car. The room is fully heated and, by day is used by a pre school play group so, if you get bored, there are building blocks and cuddly toys for you to play with.

This meeting will give us the chance to see if there are sufficient chairs on site and if the room is ultimately considered to be large enough. On current meeting turn outs the answer is very likely to be yes we feel.

Normal time 7.30pm kick off with the reports and election of Officers & the new Committee.

We hope to see as many of you as possible at the meeting as it will be our chance to discuss the decision made at the last Committee meeting to combine the Radio & Comouter section meeting evenings due to lack of support at the Computer section nights with numbers attending varying from 2 to 6 in the past 6 months.

You don’t have to be named Melvin King to work out that this is far from cost effective with the hall rent at
Perranwell at around £11.00 plus extra for the heating thats around £6.00 a head ! This translates should only two members continue to attend to some 5 times their membership fees for the privilege of attanding  [6 x 12 = 72 v normal membership fee]

Also, amalgamation will result in our ability to find speakers more readily as we can alternate content and have a radio topic one month and a comouter related topic the next. We all use computers and will be interested in computer talks and most computer section members also hold a call sign so attending radio related talks might just reignite their amateur radio interest too.

See you there.

Norman

As you may know, International Marconi Day is usually held over the 24 hours of the Saturday closest to G.Marconi’s birth date in April.

In 2011 this would occur over the Easter weekend, and we thought it expedient to vary the formula for this year only to preserve domestic harmony. Easter is, after all, a family orientated weekend and there may be some conflicts of interest within families meaning that potential operators at the participating stations could have had their permission to operate vetoed by the Station Commander in the home hi hi.

For this reason, we have moved the event to Saturday April 30th.

As it happens this is quite fortunate as Friday the 29th has been declared a public holiday courtesy of a Royal Wedding. As a consequence, there should be plenty of helpers available, in England at least, to erect antennas in readiness for the event; as long as they have not been commandeered for a family day out of course.

Next year (2012) will be the 25th International Marconi Day event. Where does the time go? We must have come up with a good formula as we keep going from strength to strength with plenty of interest from participating stations and award chasers alike. We will be marking the 25th event in some way so keep an eye out for an announcement in early 2012.

The Award

As ever, there will be two award types on offer.
1. For the transmitting amateur
2. For the Short Wave Listener

A tip for everyone working for the award as a transmitting amateur is to keep two logs for the day. Why I hear you ask? Well, one log will be your transmitting log containing your contacts made with the participating stations. We hope you work the required number bit wouldn’t it be awful to be just one short and waste all that time?

During the day you will of course hear other participating groups that you fail to communicate with, it always happens. This is where log number two comes in. In this one record the ones worked and heard [including details of station worked]. This will enable you to claim the listener’s award thereby achieving something for your efforts rather that feeling dejected at failure. It is nice to have both on your wall too of course.

We hope to receive a good number of award claims in 2011 especially with the large uptake of the Foundation licence with M3 & M6 calls abounding on the bands. IMD is an excellent place to work for an award as it is NOT A CONTEST operation should not be too competitive, although, there will always be the high powered station with no ears to contend with of course. We encourage our participants to spend a little time with callers and not just exchange a you are 5 & 9 please repeat your name and QTH style of operation!

24 hours is plenty of time to work the award for sure. Be patient and courteous to others, above all listen before you call. In the UK it is perfectly possible to work sufficient stations on 80 & 40m alone. This year we hope the higher HF band will be a little more active too to open up even more possibilities with our International award stations.

Hope to work many of you on the day.

To get Christmas, the New Year and the most inclement winter weather period out
of the way it has been decided to hold our next Foundation course in March, with the
examination in early April.

Details appear below, come on get stuck in and have a new callsign by Spring 2011.

March Foundation Course: