Sam travelled from Ipswich to give his talk, originally prepared for the 2016 RSGB convention. However, on this occasion Sam wanted to focus on the use of transverters at 2M.  Starting with the basics, he detailed what was involved and how it could  be accomplished with good design.  An in depth description followed including phase and amplitude noise figures and how they affect received and transmitted signals. It soon become apparent that Sam had not lost his enthusiasm for difficult projects  since his  retirement as a radio engineer at the British Telecom Research Labs.  Sam explained the short comings of many popular rigs produced to be ‘all thing to all amateurs’ while showing that highly specialized design might produce highly specialized results for those pursuing niche interests such as EME and DX using VHF,UHF and microwaves.

As an example of what these implementations might look like, Sam  passed around the newest  144MHz Anglian 3 transverter for inspection

Due to the fact that our planned speaker couldn’t attend, we had an RSGB video from the 2015 RSGB Conference.  The presentation was ‘Clean up your shack’ by  Ian White, GM3SEK.  While the subject was laudable the actual operations could have been covered in ten minutes instead of nearly an hour.

Maundy Thurs. No Club Meeting

Members and visitors were treated to a display of 70s to 80s communications equipment and a    talk    by   our   guest   speaker   Mervyn Foster, G4KLE

Mervyn explained how he started out in radio and achieved his Morse proficiency in the Merchant Navy where he qualified as a Radio Officer in 1962. From there he moved to the Royal Corps of Signals and other military positions where his Morse stood him in good stead.  His uncle had held the callsign G3CN and this spurred an interest in   Amateur Radio which resulted in achieving G4KLE.

Mervyn gave a detailed explanation of the equipment he had on show and explained it’s use in the field under less than optimum conditions.