Welcome to the Havering and District Amateur Radio Club website. We are based in Hornchurch Essex, around 20km East of London UK. We use the calls G4HRC, G8HRC and GX4HRC and have been serving the needs of local amateurs for over 40 years.
Windmills On The Air 2013
Posted on:
14th May 2013
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Havering and District Amateur Radio Club once again was delighted to take part in the National Mills on the air weekend from Upminster and Mountenssing Windmills. Members of Havering ARC set up a radio station and communicated with other mills and radio amateurs from all over Europe.
The objectives were simple, by using a special call sign GB2UW (UW was selected to represent Upminster Windmill) and GB4MW for Mountnessing Windmill we could use this special call and give people information on the windmills.
Radio amateurs from all over the world contacted as many windmills as they could throughout the weekend, and in the process collected special QSL cards.
From Upminster we made contact with 18 other mills from around the UK, and also communicated with over 350 other stations in France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and of course England.
You can take a look at some photos by clicking here. Some video from GB2UW can be seen on YouTube or on the Video page.
Intermediate course
Posted on:
18th April 2013
Registration for the Intermediate course is now open. The course will commence on Thursday 2nd May at 19:30 Hrs to 21:30 Hrs for 8 consecutive weeks. The course will cover all of the intermediate syllabus including the practical assessment.
The exam is planned for Thursday 27th June. The cost of the course is £50 plus the RSGB examination fee of £32.50.
Places are limited, so advance registration is essential.
For more info, please contact us.
Portable QRP topband setup with loaded 1/4 wave vertical
Posted on:
6th April 2013
Today, John M0UKD & Dave M0TAZ joind the clubs top band 160m net on 1910kHz from a portable location in Hornchurch country park. Obviously, aerials for 160m are a bit on the large side, so we chose to use a loaded vertical.
John had previously built an inductor for a 9m (30ft) fibreglass pole which worked well, but today we used Daves 18m (60ft) spiderbeam fibreglass pole. We used the same inductor, but just moved it up the pole to get a match.
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We used this calculator to estimate where the loading coil of 195µH should be placed and it suggested that for an 18m vertical to resonate at 1900kHz, it should be 13.1 metres up from the feedpoint, leaving 5 metres of wire above that.
We used a fence made of chicken wire for the ground, which seems to be quite effective in previous tests at this location.
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Once the aerial was setup, Dave tested to see where the 50Ω match was with his analyser. It was a little lower than planned, at 1800kHz.
It's still nice to see an antenna giving you a match at this frequency! The 50Ω point was easily brought up the band to 1910kHz with an ATU.
We had good reports with the local club members Jim M0MAC, Derek G3OBX, John G0PIA and George M1GEO. Reports were unsurprisingly slightly up when compared with the 9m (30ft) loaded quarter wave.
Looking forward to trying this antenna in the 1.8MHz contest later in the year!
Congratulations to David, Stuart, Matt, Wayne, Lee and Nev for completing the six week training course and passing their foundation examination on the 3rd April.
We look forward to working you on the air soon.
Deciphering Enigma and Lorenz Cyphers in WW2 by Martin Atherton, G3ZAY
Posted on:
16th March 2013
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Martin Atherton one of the guides from Bletchley gave us a fascinating talk on wartime decoding using the Enigma machine and the later use of Colossus to a packed club.
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Start the new year with a construction project
Posted on:
1st January 2013
Dave M0TAZ takes you through his thought process and constructions details of building a 2E Quad for 14 MHz for under £100.
See further construction pictures of this antenna on Flickr
Click to open article
(PDF Document)
Article on Wire Antennas
Posted on:
24th November 2012
Click to open article
(PDF Document)
Thanks to Guy G0UKN from Cray Valley Radio Society for allowing us to publish his excellent article on "Wire Antennas".
Constructors Cup 2012
Posted on:
24th November 2012
The Havering and District ARC Constructors Cup took place on the 7th November. There were many entries such as a wattmeter, two ATU's, a battery charger, crystal marker, crystal set, top band tranceiver, nixie tube clock, frequency counter, power amplifier, and WSPR tranceiver.
Congratulations to George M1GEO (pictured) for winning the advanced cup with his WSPR tranceiver and to Spencer 2E0TOL for winning the novice cup with his 50MHz frequency counter.
Photos can be seen in the gallery.
Click to view photos
Work The World Weekend
Posted on:
1st October 2012
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This year members of the Havering and District ARC added a new date to the calendar, a fun HF weekend from the "secret" nuclear bunker near Kelvedon. The idea was simple, play some radio, test out some antenna and work as many countries as we could. George M1GEO and Chris G8OCV tested out their 3 element home made beam for 14MHz and Dave M0TAZ tested out his 2 element quad for 14MHz.
A considerable amount of DX was worked on both aerials including.
VY2DA - Canada
N6WJN - West Coast USA
HP1IBF - Panama
HP3FTD - Panama
8P6HX - Barbados
PR7MB - Brazil
CU9AC - Azores
7T50I - Algeria
VP8LP - Falklands
BY1WXD/P0 - Club station China
JW8DBJ - Japan
VK5PAS - Australia
DX was worked on both 28 and 14MHz, with 28MHz providing reliable contacts into the USA for most of the weekend. It was great to hear so many loud DX stations and to work west coast USA on 10m with a genuine s9 was remarkable, especially as this was with the 14 Mhz quad!
We had a BBQ on Saturday evening and the weekend weather was kind enough to allow outdoor operating most of the weekend. Pictures of the weekend can now be found online, a special thanks to Arentas (our newest club member) for documenting the event.
73 Dave M0TAZ
QRO Portable operating
Posted on:
21st August 2012
Last night decided to dip my toe into the world of QRO portable. With the assistance of John M0UKD. To qualify for QRO in the UK you need close on 400w, yes I know this is QRP in the USA ! ....or Italy...
Equipment used:
Icom 7000
Linear Amp Explorer 1200
12m roach pole
Linear Amp SPC tuner
Doublet antenna
(20m per leg)
Honda EU20 generator
(LPG powered)
65Ah battery to power the radio.
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As I had never ran QRO outside before, the afternoon / evening was very much an experiment. I looked to answer the following questions.
Would the generator cope with the changeable SSB current load characteristics?
Would the RF be too much for the Icom (and maybe operator)?
Would my speaker wire antenna cope with 400w?
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The first issue was resolved very quickly, the generator would power up the amp heaters....well no heaters no amp so that was a good start.
The Honda has two basic setting for power delivery, low demand or changeable high / low demand.
I set the generator to low / high and we started at a modest 100w (RTTY setting so 100% duty cycle) out of the amp, no issues. We then quickly progressed to 200, 300 and 400w again no real issues. I of course didnt pass the 400w setting, as this would clearly be in breach of my licence and I didnt have my 50 Ohm load to hand.
It would seem the generator did take a few seconds to recover, but this was going from little or no load to pulling some reasonable current. The power would jump up to 300, then as the generator recovered it would climb to 400w quickly.
The next test was the amount of RF flying around, John UKD had a basic RF field strength meter and while this was not designed to provide absolute measurements it was a relative indication. This indicated the RF close to the operating position was nothing above the usual levels, the antenna center was 12m above our heads...
A walk around indicated lots of RF was radiating from the antenna so it was all systems go, or should that be CQ.
80m was the band of choice, as 40m was quite poor with little UK activity. We quickly built up quite a few calls, and one thing became evident quickly...our signal was quite big! Typically we was 10dB up on your standard 100w station, and 20dB up on most M3 /M6 station. If you couple this with the fact that we had an antenna that was reasonably efficient it did provide some interesting operating.
On some occasions we were being called by stations we simply couldnt pull from the noise, as many stations (me included from home) simply cant radiate a good signal on 80m due to the low ERP or ability of my antenna to convert W to RF.
We worked 50 station in total, including Peter G3ZRS who previously was Linear Amp UK. He commented that "your using an amplifier that I built"
Pictures of the equipment can be found online here.
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73 Dave M0TAZ
Foundation success
Posted on:
20th August 2012
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Congratulations to Gordon and Paul for successfully passing their foundation exams with us on Wednesday 15th August.
Well done!
WSPR talk by George M1GEO
Posted on:
10th August 2012
George, M1GEO gave the club an interesting talk this week on WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter). George gave an overview of what WSPR is and what it is useful for, as well as showing some of his results. There was also photos and details about his homebrew WSPR tranceiver, located at the Secret Nuclear Bunker (GB0SNB).
George has kindly shared the powerpoint slides from the talk, which are available to download.
The TimeLapse videos are on YouTube: Map | Software
There is some more information, and graphs which didn't make the cut here: Statistics, Theory and Code.
Work The World Weekend As with last years event this will be a fun event running for 24 hours and it will be held at the Secret Nuclear Bunker in Kelvedon Hatch. As the title suggest we aim to chat with as many countries as possible, but its not a competition.
