What a great start to Waygood’s amateur radio club!
Thanks to everyone who came along.Proceedings began with everyone introducing themselves. This revealed a big range of interests in all types of radio production.
I spoke briefly about the variety of people who had expressed interest in the club and the wide range of locations they are based in. This inevitably means that not everyone can attend the club meetings at Harkers. A way for everyone to communicate regularly will be via this blog here on Waygood’s website.
I outlined how I had stumbled upon Amateur radio at the Peterlee Town Fair in 2006 and how this had led to developing a project as part of the AV Festival 2008: Broadcast. This will include the setting up of an arts based amateur radio club at Waygood and the coordination of a Radio Rally at Newcastle upon Tyne’s Grainger Market during AV Festival 08.
Michelle Hirchhorn, from AV Festival described the remit of the festival, which takes place 28 February to 8 March 2008 and potential links between Waygood’s Radio Club and commissioned artist, Marko Peljhan, It was agreed that Marko would make a presentation about his work to club at a future meeting. (More news on this below)
The star of the evening was Glen Thompson of Tynemouth amateur radio club, Glen gave a brilliant presentation on the background to amateur radio and several examples of how it is used including an ICOM news feature on the very competitive international contesting competitions. We also saw an informative video from the Radio Society of Great Britain on 'How to become a Radio Amateur' and the exciting pastime of setting up stations on remote islands (IOTA). As Michelle said after the meeting this was pitched perfectly for a first meeting of the club. It gave us all a good idea of the creative possibilities. Ginny Reed commented, that it would be good to experiment with the technology of shortwave radio as soon as possible in order to discover what it’s possibilities are. Michael Mulvihill agreed with this and suggested that at the next meeting of the club a radio and aerial are set up to play around with receiving shortwave signals at Harkers.
Glen described the Foundation License training necessary for individuals who want to use amateur radio. This can happen over a couple of weekends and evenings, and usually takes about 10 -15 hours depending on the knowledge of the individual. A multiple-choice test needs to be passed to receive your foundation license. It was agreed that in general people were interested in doing this as soon as possible, but that we would all consider this for our next meeting.
Andy Sheridan filmed the meeting for Waygood’s archive. He focused on Glen’s presentation. This will be edited in the near future and will be available for you to view.
Much enthusiastic chat took place with a few glasses of wine after the meeting and the last visitors to Waygood @ Harker’s were waved off at around 10pm.
Labels: Amateur radio Club, AV Festival 08, Broadcast, Marko Peljhan, Waygood
