MKARS Club Update and Programme April 2022
As we emerge into spring and from the latest Omnicron COVID surge, we can start to look towards lighter evening and meeting together for Club events.
For April we have the Easter holidays interspersed with our meetings, but what we have planned is;
Monday April 11th – MKARS visit to Moonraker at Woburn Sands. Moonraker are hosting our visit and as well as looking around the shop and warehouse, Chris hopes to have a few antennas ready to demonstrate and chat through with us. This is open to club members and if they choose to buy anything on the night, they will of course receive the Club discount on their purchase as well as the Watts points. Note this will start early at 18.30 and run through to about 20.30.
April 18th is Easter Monday and there is no meeting. We will carry forward our planned Skills night to May.
Monday April 25th – We have a session at the TNMOC at 19.30 which will be an Arduino night. Come and bring your radio project and get 5-10 minutes talk about what you have developed/ written in code and join the discussion.
I have been asked by a few members what we are doing about holding meetings on Zoom. All our future meetings will be at the TMNOC but there will be occasions when we use Zoom if we have an outside speaker or to join with other clubs. If there are meetings to be streamed, they will be advertised. Our coffee chat net using Zoom on Friday, led by our vice chair, Brendan G8IXK, will of course continue.
Looking ahead to May we have events planned around getting on HF, another session on ATV and a Raspberry pi projects session – in fact a pi and pie night.
As the bands improve as the number of sunspots ticks up and the SFI increases, a couple of members have approached me about having an HF DX spotter for MKARS set up using Whats App. If anyone would like to lead this, perhaps they could contact me. Our VHF/UHF/SHF contesters already have one running as part of their activities where they share beacon information.
Talking of contesting, we continue to need new members join our successful MKARS team. We run induction sessions for those that are not sure what to do – why not give it a try? In a similar vein we aim to be entering HF NFD and VHF NFD this year – once again we will need an MKARS team to enter these events.
Finally, everything is booked for us to hold the MKARS Radio Rally on our normal bank holiday weekend in August (Sunday 28th) at the Irish Club, Bletchley. Please get the word out that our Rally returns this year.
Thats all for now,
73’s Phil G4FVZ