Saturday 30 September 2017

RSGB National Hamfest 2017

This years visit was made on Friday as usual. There was heavy rain as the outside area opened, so much so that the inside hall was opened early. A used Tonna 50MHz five element  yagi for £20 was purchased from the flea market with the intent of converting it to a lightweight 4m Yagi. Indoors a four section 20' swaged mast was finally bought (I thought about getting one last year!) from Moonraker

The usual big traders were in attendance, although some on a smaller scale than last year, for example Waters and Stanton. It was impossible to get near the QRPLABS stand as G0UPL had to queue of people placing orders. I have still to finally meet him after having previously had many transactions with him from Texas

The highlight of the trip was non transactional! A few months ago I assembled the BATC minituone receiver, but it failed to receive the DATV signal generated by the RPI, even though it passed self test so I put it aside. The BATC would be at Newark and I guessed would have real DATV signals, so I took the receiver along. Noel G8GTZ was only too pleased to try it out and it passed testing with flying colours. Now I can move onto assembling my Portsdown Transmitter modules

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