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On Thursday evenings I’ve been moonlighting as an electronics student at CARS enrolled on the Intermediate Amateur Radio course.  It’s been going well so far (week 3) but there is quite a lot to learn, struggling to keep things in my head what with pretty intensive PPL exams happening at the same time!

On the plus side, I only have until the end of April for the 3 remaining PPL exams (is that a plus?!) so there should be plenty of time to cram the radio knowledge in before the final exam.

The course is held in Chelmsford and I recorded the GB3DA repeater, hoping to catch the short exchange that happens on the drive up from the course – as it happens some other users jumped on shortly after I started recording and gave us 38 minutes of audio – busy!

GB3DA – 31-Mar-2011 by mcoms

Patience paid off and I got my first and second QSOs tonight, M3YLN and G8ORV, one mobile within a mile and the other in Southend town (3 miles).  Both strong 9′s, pegging the meter.  Good to talk to both and a refreshing occurance after the silence of last night.

It’s all working :)

I’ve finally delivered on an old promise of getting my amateur radio foundation licence. Today Ofcom granted me the callsign M6DVX and this evening I’ve been trying to contact some local stations.

Being as geeky as I can get, I had my callsign validated for EchoLink right away and this evening tried Clive’s EchoLink node MB7IAD-L (265297). After installing under Wine (Ubuntu), I tested the link and found I could easily transmit a well readable signal the 20 miles at 1W. Alas, no one answered my call.

Made another call on the 2m repeater GB3DA, complete with ACK, however again, no replies. Booo!

Likewise, calls on 145.500 were un-answered.

A little disappointing, but it’s only day 1 and I did call rather late. There’s always tomorrow!