Another alumni meet-up was held in central London on Thursday 19th June. Pic shows M0RLM, M0HSW, M0IPY, M0WJE, G3ZAY, M0TKU, M0TJH.

Chair – Edward Wei M0KTU, Churchill

Secretary – Thomas Griffiths M6TZL, Queens

Junior Treasurer – Brychan Thomas M7OLL, Catz

Hon. President – Martin Atherton G3ZAY, Emma alumnus

The annual BBQ was held at the shack on June 15^th. G3ZAY M0VFC M0BLF M7OLL M7YOM M7TWJ M0KUQ M0WUT G3XZP M7KFH G0DDX G0TPX M0LCM M7NOJ and M1GEO were present.

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 16^th 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 2^nd 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 100^th anniversary of the formation of the International Amateur Radio Union.

Many thanks to Rob M0VFC for new monitors and two replacement Windows 11 computers.

Caius College – Bateman Auditorium Thursday Feb 13^th at 1900, Marek Szuba M0JUR.

GNU Radio is a popular free-software digital signal processing framework which, among its other uses, powers many Software Defined Radio projects. In this talk Marek will provide a brief introduction to the visual-programming model employed by GNU Radio, discuss its basic terminology and some of the more commonly used blocks, and demonstrate its practical use by implementing a simple software-defined radio receiver using a cheap RTL-SDR-type USB device.

Caius College – Bateman Auditorium Thursday Feb 27^th at 1900, Dan McGraw M0WUT.

Dan will discuss some of the mathematical concepts behind the GNU Radio building blocks used by Marek in his earlier talk.

For more information about CUWS email Martin Atherton g3zay@btinternet.com

Welcome back for the Michaelmas Term. CUWS will be at the Freshers’ Fair on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

We are likely to be entering the CQWW SSB Contest over the weekend of Oct 26/27.  Email g3zay@btinternet.com if interested.

I have 3 places in my car for a trip to Bletchley Park on Sunday Nov 17th – leaving Cambridge at 0745 and returning by about 1700. Admission is free for RSGB members if they print out a pass from the RSGB website (no soft copies on phones are valid) and RSGB membership is free for students with any level of amateur radio licence. Let me know if interested.

At the end of term we will probably be using the youth callsign GB24YOTA from the shack on the afternoons of Sunday Dec 1st, Friday Dec 6th and Saturday Dec 7th. Operators must be under 26. More info later.

Next term we are planning a couple of talks about software defined radio. Probably an initial one on how to use GNU radio software to develop tailored modules to talk to the most common radio dongles and demodulate different signals. And a second one looking more at the maths and processes “under the hood” of SDR.

The RSGB licence exams are available online with remote invigilation and we have copies of the latest exam manuals at the shack if anyone wants to borrow one.

In September there was a regular meet-up of CUWS members now working or living in London. These occur 3 or 4 times a year in central London – usually at a Spaghetti House restaurant.

L-R M0IPY M0TJH M0TKU M0RLM M0HSW G0PCE G3ZAY M0WJE.

Martin G3ZAY (Hon President)

CUWS aired the special GB23YOTA callsign on Dec 1st and 2nd and made about 700 QSOs on SSB.

Ops at GB23YOTA

Back in November a small crew from Windfall Films came to the shack for some background footage highlighting amateur radio for a documentary about Flight MH370 and the theory that WSPR signals could shed some light on the track of the plane. Rhys M0WGY, Arnav M7ORS and Anna M7BBR were all interviewed about their interest in the hobby and filmed making QSOs with VP8LP in the Falklands and W4DKS in Virginia,

Sadly none of the material was used in the programme……

CUWS will be present at the Freshers Fair on October 3rd and 4th. We hope to enter the CQ WW SSB Contest at the end of October and we plan to use the special callsign GB23YOTA from 1200-1800 on Dec 1st and 2nd. Trips to Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing may be arranged, Information on other future activities will be sent to the email list later in the term.

We entered the CQWW SSB Contest at the end of October and came 1st in England in the Multi-Op Two Transmitter category.

Nikolas M0IPY operating CQWW SSB

Brychan M7OLL operating CQWW

Anna M7BBR operating

Adam M0RZO operating

Rhys M0WGY operating CQWW SSB

Hugo M0HSW operating

* Will Vinnicombe M0VWA arranged a short Jamboree on the Air session at the shack for a local scout group in early October. Greetings messages were exchanged with other Jamboree stations.

* Half a dozen potential new members visited the shack in October and borrowed copies of the licence exam books.

* Dan McGraw M0WUT ran a couple of technical sessions at Caius College covering the remote controlled radio station project and the use of oscilloscopes, signal generators, and vector network analysers for RF measurements.

* Temporary LF antennas have been erected near the shack. We have a 4 element steerable phased array for 7MHz and a single quarter wave vertical antenna for 3.6MHz. These will be removed by the end of March so the University Farm can cut hay for their cattle.

* We entered the CQWW SSB contest using our special callsign M4A at the end of October and made 3743 contacts. The claimed score was 4,689,314 and it looks like we probably won our Multi-op 2-Transmitter category for England.

* Past Chair, William M0WJE, entered the CQWW CW (morse code) contest in November with his own call and claimed just over 400,000 points.

* The special youth callsign GB22YOTA was used from the shack on December 2nd and 3rd and over 800 contacts were made around the world. The call is still available at various times until the end of the month if any member (or guest) under the age of 26 wishes to use it. Detailed availability is shown on qrz.com against the GB22YOTA callsign.

* Various special 1920s callsigns are available for all RSGB+CUWS members to book and use from the shack to commemorate the first 2-way trans-Atlantic contacts on HF. One also marks the first use of radio from a moving train! See https://rsgb.org/main/activity/transatlantic-tests/

* Finally the shack has been used recently for a number of 3-4hr short contests including:

– 70MHz AFS (6th out of 19)

– 50MHz AFS (3rd out of 16)

– 1.8MHz AFS (6th out of 65) Congratulations to club member Rob M0VFC who went out portable and won this event.

– Sadly the shack location is not very competitive on VHF/UHF because of screening by Madingley Hill to the south-west but we can still get out well to Scotland and continental Europe. The 50MHz contest performance was boosted by some sudden Sporadic E propagation to the south-east.