If you are a licensed amateur radio operator, I hope this evenings post will be of interest. If you aren’t and persist in reading, then I am sorry for the jargon – perhaps you might become interested in joining the community of hams?
Fairly regularly, I run the Isle Of Wight Radio Society’s (IoWRS) Thursday Night Net (TNN). It happens 2000-2100 local time most Thursday evenings. Everything is routed via the net controller who manages the net – this week it was me.
There are different ways of running a net, and different outcomes – no two thursxday evenings are the same. An abiding fear is that I put a call out and nobody comes to the party. Or possibly only one or two other people join in. That’s how tonights net started. What do you do? Let it run it’s course, or say “let’s not bother tonight” . That latter very rarely happens, I usually try to run it.
What helps is having a topic – that gets people talking, and often draws in more operators who wish to contribute. I should say, you absolutely do not have to be a member of the IoWRS to take part in the net, any licensed operator is more than welcomed to be involved.
Tonights topic was “what questions do you have about HF (High Frequency)?” Well, it was posed like that. What it turned into was as discussion about high noise levels on HF radios and what can be done about it.
A fair bit was discussed about what causes the noise (LED lamps, smart TV’s, broadband boxes were all cited as sources) . What to do about it was also discussed; Go mobile, add line filters, try different antennas, change the position of existing antennas that kind of thing. It was for me (an inexperienced HF operator) an invaluable, and interesting hour. If you are on facebook, look for the GB3IW page – there’s a live video recording there.
Here are some random, unrelated pictures;
