The Galway VHF Group plays a very active part in sporting activities around Co. Galway, providing communications support and expertise where publicly available technologies and knowledge do not suffice.
One of the traditional outings is the annual Head of the River regatta, hostd every year by the Tribesmen Rowing Club on Galway’s river Corrib.
This year, it was held over the Easter weekend, and was attended by Galway VHF Group members Steve, EI5DD, myself, EI8DRB and John, EI/G8FZW. Steve manned the scoring desk, John, the start line and I the finish. John called in the start times in batches, and I called in the finish times, also in one page batches.
Immediately, however, a problem reared its head. John’s position on the river and low(ish) power output coupled with a large metal siding providing much unwanted occlusion, meant that plenty of fading and noise decreased the quality of John’s signal to Steve quite badly, necessitating much repitition. I however heard him fine, giving me an idea. I had my new Yaesu FT8900 in the car, and thought that this might be the ideal time to try out the cross band repeat feature. I suggested this to Steve, and we decided that for the next race, we’d try it out.
Well before the start of the next race, I put the FT8900 into X-Band repeat mode on 145.450MHz and 433.450MHz, and all reports were very good. Since John didn’t have a 70cm rig, myself and Steve called on 433.450, repeating to 145.450, whereas John called in on 145.450, repeating to 433.450 and coming in to Steve at 20 over 9, meaning that we got through the timing sheets in short order.
The day was pretty uneventful, in that it went smoothly and with no real issues, bar the aforementioned. The Tribesmen comittee expressed their thanks at a job well done.
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on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 11:25 am and is filed under radio.
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