BIWOTA-2019

British Inland Waterways On The Air 2019

When I heard about this event, I thought I'd participate from the White Bear Marina in Adlington (close to my home) but a subsequent call to them revealed that they were closed for the Bank Holiday weekend, so I opted to go to Glass Dock Marina instead. It's around 3.5miles South of Lancaster.

I'm very familiar with the area and have explored it many times on-foot and on motorbike. It's a favourite spot of mine and for the purposes of playing radio, it has the added convenience of public toilets, a shop, a chuck-wagon, a cafe and a pub - this really helps when you're trying to sell the idea to your Station Manager.

In the photo above, you can see the car-park on the right and this is where I reversed my truck up to the fence line next to the footpath. It meant that I could strap my mast to a fence post for easy erection and I could also attach a second mast to my towball for a 2M antenna.

Once I'd got the masts up, out came the picnic table and deck-chairs for a nice, comfortable day in the sun. And boy, was it sunny!!! In fact, it would have been unbearable had it not been for the day-long cool breeze coming in from the estuary.

Before starting, we had a bit of breakfast and a cup of tea and then the Station Manager got stuck into her book while I started calling CQ on 2. It was pretty quiet but then it was still early on a Sunday morning. Someone I know from home shouted me but he was mobile and lost me before we could could establish a QSO, so I switched over to 40M on the SotaBeams BandHopper II and put some calls out there.

My first contact was G1YPG in Stone, North Midlands. Steve gave me a 59 and he was the same to me. The band was really quiet and I'd started to think something was wrong with my station until Steve came along, so it was good to confirm everything was okay.

I briefly switched back to 2M to make sure that was working fine and had a good QSO with G7CDA (Douggie) in Morecambe and he very kindly posted a notice on the NW FUSION GROUP for me in the hope I might get more calls. He told me that many of the members liked to play 2mSSB so I said I'd put some calls out on 144.300 but I would be restricted by the fact that I was vertically polarised :-(


Anyway, despite lots of calling, I got few responses on 2M SSB so I focused on 40M again and pretty soon I was reaching people all across the UK from Ireland, to the Outer Hebrides, Wales, Devon, Kent, Norfolk and Skegness. The was an amazing amount of Inter-G on the band and the signals were just fantastic! Needless to say, many operators were using high power (300W in Ireland) and I was just running 5W on my FT-818ND.

Later on in the afternoon the Europeans started to swamp the band and some were acting rather bullishly, stomping all over well-established frequencies. I managed to make quite a few contacts in France and Germany but then decided to call it a day.

It was a great day out and was thoroughly enjoyed by both myself and the Station Manager. Glasson Dock is a beautiful area on a sunny day and there's plenty of short, rewarding walks from the car park. Highly recommended.