There is a particular silence after you call CQ with a callsign that has never been transmitted. You have said it, it has gone out, and for a second or two you have no idea whether a single person in the country is listening.
On Saturday afternoon, from Castle Hill Country Park, G5SRS went on the air for the first time.
What we put up
We were operating from midday until three. The main aerial was an end-fed wire held up by two telescopic poles, deliberately strung low and flat rather than high — an NVIS arrangement, which for anyone who has not met the term means the signal is fired almost straight up, bounces off the ionosphere and comes back down over a radius of a few hundred miles.
It sounds like a mistake. It is the opposite. A high aerial throws its signal out at a shallow angle and skips clean over the whole of Britain; a low one fills in exactly the gap that matters when the stations you want are in Wiltshire, Yorkshire and Cornwall rather than Argentina.
Two radios shared the wire: a Xiegu G90 and a Yaesu FT-891 — one small and modest, one with rather more behind it. Later in the afternoon we swapped to a vertical, which trades that high-angle coverage for a flatter take-off, and listened to what a different aerial does to the same band on the same day. That comparison, on the ground, in an hour, teaches more than a winter of reading about it.
Who we were looking for
Saturday was Churches and Chapels on the Air, when amateurs set up in parish churches and chapels around the country and put them on the air for the day. We were not activating a church ourselves — we were hunting them. Working down the band listening for stations calling from a vestry or a bell tower, which is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon and exactly the sort of thing NVIS is for.
Several club members came along during the afternoon simply to watch, which was rather the point — a wire in a tree and somebody tuning across a band explains this hobby better than any amount of talking about it.
Ten churches went into the log. Not bad for three hours, a wire and a first outing.
Why it mattered more than the log
The club is a week old. On Saturday it had a wire in the air, two operators taking turns, and its own callsign going out over Salisbury for the first time. Whatever else the year brings, that part is done and cannot be done again.
Photographs below.
