It was our last meeting before Christmas and the New Year. A good number of members turned up, perhaps not as many as in the past, but I know that one member had a very good excuse, he’s suffering from Gout!

 We were pleased that our club contest callsign, G3B has been renewed again till 2016.  We’ll have to have a good look at some other contests in addition to CQWW SSB, to get our overall score for the year high enough for future renewals.

 The Club will re-start again on the 9^th of January 2014. So, till then, have a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Our speaker for the evening told of her work with the RSGB archives which she is currently sorting and cataloguing. Included in the archive are the stories and photos of early pioneers in radio, mostly radio amateurs.  There were tales of WW1 pilots trying to fly their biplanes with one hand and use a radio with the other while still trying to shoot with a pistol, and the story of radio amateurs finding signals from Germany indicating the Zeppelins were being brought out and made ready for flight, giving precious minutes to get UK aircraft airborne to meet them.  In the Second World War many radio amateurs were volunteer interceptors looking for enemy signals and reporting to our authorities, even though they were forbidden the use of their transmitting equipment.

Elaine finished by making the group aware that they will be the subject of future amateur radio archives and that we should make plans now to save photos and documents since so much is stored on Hard Drives and easily destroyed, especially when stations are being dismantled following the final close down of a station.

The second part of Paul’s Software Defined Radio talk was in a more holiday mood. Answers to questions about details of his talk were rewarded with ‘Christmas Presents’!

Paul explained how to get started with SDR by using easily obtained items on the internet. Several free programmes for displaying the SDR output were also shown.