The Committee for the 2024/25 Academic Year was:
Chair – Stephen De Bank M0UXP
Secretary – Edward Wei M0KTU
Junior Treasurer – Brychan Thomas M7OLL
Hon. President – Martin Atherton G3ZAY
The Summer Barbecue was held at the shack on June 16th 2024 and attended by about 10 members.
CUWS member Rhys M0WGY represented the RSGB at the 2024 YOTA summer event and has been appointed the Universities Youth Champion. He is now doing a PhD at Oxford.
CUWS was represented at the Freshers’ Fair as usual and about 50 new names/emails were added to the soc-cuws-interested list on the sympa system. 8 people expressed an interest in visits to the shack and these were supplemented by a few late additions who made contact during the year. There were two recruits who already had Foundation licences on arriving in Cambridge. Since then 6 students have taken the Foundation exam and one went on to take the Intermediate and Full in quick succession. 2 or 3 more have indicated their intention to take the Foundation exam over the summer. As always, the shack has a supply of exam manuals for all three levels available for members to borrow. We have 9 new members since 1/10/2024.
In the Michaelmas Term CUWS entered the CQ WW SSB contest as usual in the Multi-op, Two-station category but only placed 2nd in the UK, losing out to the Wisbech contest group which has much more space for large beam antennas. We are grateful to the University Farm for the winter use of the field adjacent to the south side of the shack which housed a 40m 4-square and an 80m quarter wave until mid-March.
During the CQ WW SSB contest it was noticed that the roof was leaking and the Society is extremely grateful to the team of M1GEO, M0WUT, and M0BLF led by M0VFC who replaced the complete roof over a couple of weekends in November. The costs of repairs were covered directly by alumni including the above team.
We were able to hold two talks on software defined radio in the Lent Term at Caius College. The first by Marek M0JUR looked at the GNU Radio software/GUI for developing SDR code and the second by Dan M0WUT looked at some of the maths behind the GUI SDR modules. Many thanks to Dr Holburn G3XZP for arranging the room booking.
The shack was used for various AFS contest entries including 432MHz, 144MHz, 70MHz, 50MHz, 80/40m CW/SSB/Data, and 160m club calls. Partly thanks to that assistance, the Camb Hams team won the Super League again this year. The shack was also used for GB24YOTA activations at the end of the Michaelmas Term and for the three annual YOTA Contests. Finally, our Hon President G3ZAY used the shack to air the special GB0IARU callsign in April marking the 100th anniversary of the formation of the International Amateur Radio Union.
Many thanks to Rob M0VFC for new monitors and two replacement Windows 11 computers.