The 2nd of July was the date of the Thornbury Carnival and what a glorious day it was.  Hot and sunny.  Thanks to those who helped with the organisation, who provided equipment, who got equipment to/from the site and to those that manned our tent through the long day.

We where allocated a prominent position slightly down the hill from the entrance/exit so there were lots of people passing and quite a few stopped by to see us.  Although the pitch was in a good position for passing traffic, it was in a very noisy position, not far from a music stage and had a children’s inflatable play ‘thing’ next door.  The latter had an acoustically noisy generator running the whole day which, at times, made hearing the radio’s hard.

All-in tho, it was a good day.  We handed-out many flyer’s advertising the club and had at least one person promise to come to the club.  Jane and Sue did an excellent job at arresting our local Police, telling them about Amateur radio and getting a promise of a lecture….

The real test of success will be how many potential members come and see us over the next few weeks.  But even if its none, I believe it a worthwhile exercise as it helped communicate Amateur radio to the general public, raise our profile within the community and has most likely secured us a talk.

Lashing a pole to an in-situ climbing frame and another to my truck we managed to get a dipole for 20m operational and made several contacts across Europe. We also had a short ‘white stick’ antenna for 2m and 70cms which allowed us to communicate with members not attending the site during the day.  Peter assembled 10 x SDR radio kits to sell to interested visitors and sold 5, including 1 to Mark ;-).

Thanks again folks,

Andrew
G0RVM