David, G8UOD was the quizmaster and four teams, two of three members and two of two members took part in the quiz. Questions about early wireless and general topics followed.

The winning team consisting of Richard, G3NII, Don, G4LOO and Brian, G8GHR were the winners by two points.  Attendance was down a bit compared to other years, but we had just as much fun.

Our autumn surplus equipment sale was a success!  Numerous members found just the items they were looking for and many left with boxes full of useful bits and pieces. Keep a lookout for the date of the next sale sometime in late spring. It will be announced in our club’s programme

Nick Cooke’s presentation, lasting fifty minutes, gave an overview of the history of Bletchley Park before the codebreakers arrived two weeks before the start of WWII. The Leon family lived in the mansion, prior to the codebreakers. Sir Herbert Samuel Leon was a wealthy financier, Bletchley Park being one of four properties that he owned. On his death in 1926, his second wife, Fanny Leon, continued running the estate and after her death in 1937, the property was left to the children from the two marriages. They were not interested in keeping the estate, so an auction was organised. In the auction, the reserve price of £7,500 for the mansion and nearly 50 acres of land surrounding the mansion was not met. A local builder, Mr. Hubert Faulkner, offered £6,000 and this was accepted. His intention was to demolish the mansion and build houses in the grounds. The sale was brought to the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service, the predecessor to MI6 and after an ‘arrangement’ with the builder, the site was purchased for the Government Code and Cypher School. This was Spring 1938, approximately a year and a half from the start of WWII.

Interviews began to take place, recruiting staff for this Intelligence Factory, with a new group of personnel being interviewed, called mathematicians. Eventually, nearly 9,000 people worked at Bletchley Park, 80% of these were women. The advantages of the site were explained (close to the main railway line, out of London etc.) and then the working of the German cipher machine, Enigma, was discussed. Various techniques were used to decipher the German enciphered communications produced by Enigma; the end result was to find the daily settings that each network used. The number of ways that a three rotor Enigma could be set up at midnight (the choice of rotors, the position of these in the machine, the 10 plug leads on the plug-board and the rotor output ring settings) is an amazing  159, 000,000,000,000,000,000! To break the ciphered messages, cribbing techniques became the norm, along with the development of machines such as the Bombe, which was primarily the result of the brilliance of Alan Turing. Two hundred and eleven Bombes were built during the War at the British Tabulating Machine Company in Letchworth; each Bombe was valued at a third the cost of a Lancaster bomber. The Bombe is not a computer, but an electro-mechanical ‘circuit tester’. There is no doubt that this machine speeded up the whole process of finding the daily ‘key’ or settings and thus breaking Enigma ciphered messages. A typical time to break each message was around 2.5 hours!

Finally, an explanation of the Wireless Intercept stations {Y stations} was presented, this being very relevant to the interests of the Shefford & District Amateur Radio Society.

Text by Nick Cooke

Don, G4LOO began with statistics covering our overall success during the CQWW SSB contest. Points earned this year (uncorrected) were over twice achieved last year and much more than 2020 and 2019. This success can be put down to improved propagation conditions and our use of more advanced equipment.

The video shown was one from last year’s RSGB@8 program titled ‘Getting started on QO-100 by Dom Smith, M0BLF’  Dom explained his equipment set up and showed his small dish antenna. He demonstrated a contact through the satellite before the wind and the rain got the better of his location. However, he did demonstrate the stable contact through the satellite due to it’s geo-stable position.

If you missed the showing, you can find it here, (with good audio):