Went up Blackpool Tower today armed with my 2m handie and first contact was M3WJZ/P calling cq SOTA! Blackpool Tower pt3 - YouTube Sean
In reply to 2E0BAX:
Blackpool Tower was certainly my most unusual contact yesterday. Visibility was excellent so I had no problem making out the Tower from Fair Snape Fell, the Lake District Fells in particular looked brilliant.
Cheers for the contact.
Iain, M3WJZ
I know it’s one of your favourites Sean, and the height and prominence of Blackpool Tower are sufficient, but unless it gets abandoned and covered with lots of soil, with vegetation becoming firmly established, then SP-018 it will not be.
Hope you’ve claimed you chaser points. Gary should put at “QTH Blackpool Tower” filter on the Database just for you!
Tom M1EYP
In reply to M1EYP:
Somewhat OT but related to going up tall structures and playing radio…
I was once in our Japanese office on the 28th floor in Shinagawa, Tokyo (a business district) and turned on my laptop and let the Wifi do a scan. The number of networks found was so many the 3Com driver crashed! I couldn’t get it to work at all and had to plug in an ethernet cable. Back at ground level the PC quite happy. Still a huge number of networks but not so many the driver crashed.
I haven’t been up Blackpool Tower since 1972 and I wasn’t licensed then. (I was still in short trousers!) What’s it like for commercial transmitters? Is it an interference nightmare or is it reasonably clean on 2m/70cms etc?
Andy
MM0FMF
Sean’s your expert, he’s been up there with a hand-portable quite a few times I think. I know that Radio Wave 96.5MHz is transmitted from there, and I think the annual RSL Illuminations FM is as well. As for PMR, 'phone networks etc, I don’t know.
Tom M1EYP
In reply to M1EYP:
Its my second time up there with a radio the first being 2 yrs ago and on that occassion i took my 817 only operating on 2m and i remember having no problems with QRM. This time i only had my Kenwood handie and at times was wiped out with interference but i will say its prone to this.
There seems to be more mast’s and aerials up there along with a sky dish!
I stayed round the north side while the kids played on the glass floor 380ft up on the south side.
We went as high as it is possible for the public to go which was another 2 lots of steps taking us to 412ft in the fresh air. Sean / M0GIA