Steve Smith, G0TDJ (pictured above), was the lucky winner of a Yaesu VR-160 handheld receiver today when his ticket was drawn from the hat in our raffle to raise money for Little Havens Hospice. Steve, an enthusiastic ham from Kent, saw the draw take place on twitter and said “Many Thanks, and I hope it raised lots of cash for Havens Hospices”.

The raffle raised £50 for Little Havens Hospice, a local charity, who provide respite care for children with life threatening conditions. The VR-160 receiver was kindly donated to us by Yaesu UK, so a big thank you to them, as well as all who bought tickets and helped raise money for a very worthy cause – maybe it will be you next time!

If you would like to find out more about Little Havens just click the picture below.

Win a Yaesu VR-160 handheld scanner

Tickets are £1 per strip

All proceeds raised go to Little Havens childrens hospice

Raffle closes 31st Dec 2011. Come into our Hockley store or call 01702 206835 to buy your raffle tickets.

We had our Christmas party last Wednesday 14th at the Chichester Hotel near Rawreth, and as always a great time was had by everyone.

This year we sadly lost Mike ‘ZIPY’ Wheaton a much loved member of our team, he was always the first to dress up for the annual party so we organised a silly hat competition in his memory, with John Southee our Despatch Manager claiming the prize, a bottle of champagne.

John Southee our Despatch Manager in his winning hat.

Sian (Admin) & Steve (IT Manager)

James (Service Admin) & Sarah (Admin)

Kevin, Chas & John (Despatch)

W&S Christmas parties also provide the chance for us to catch up with old colleagues like Robin and Fred with Derek (Service Engineer).

Jeff Stanton (Director).

You can see more pictures from our Christmas party on our facebook page here.

On Wednesday 8th December we completed the installation of an EME antenna system comprising 4 x 6 element 144MHz LFA Yagis made by G0KSC. This was the original pre-production antenna system that G0KSC used for his EME tests when developing the VFA system. We are encouraged that we can regularly hear beacons over 500km to the east. We need to do more tests to establish the propagation for terrestrial contacts from here in Hockley. This is part of our program towards the sponsorship of the World EME Conference next August in Cambridge. Hopefully we will be able to begin EME tests once the necessary software and Linear Amplifier is installed. Currently we are running 50 Watts under the call G0PEP. Anybody wishing to check their path back here to Hockley should e-mail us for a test.

Once again Waters & Stanton sponsored the Science Prize at the Greensward Academy Year 11 annual awards evening on. This year held at the Cliffs Pavilion, Southend on Monday, 21^st November. A plaque, certificate and cheque for £25 were presented by Jeff Stanton to the winner, student Samantha Ellis.

In the next couple of weeks we will be installing an EME 2m antenna system as part of a new demonstration facility. The system will comprise 4 bays of 6 element LFA Yagi antennas from InnovAntennas. This will provide just over 23dB of forward gain and will easily handle full UK power limit – and beyond. The plan is to feed this via a Discovery 2m linear amplifier from UK Linear Amps. The array will be steerable using a Yaesu G5500 Az/El rotator. The call sign will be G0PEP.

It is often difficult to see all the knobs on a modern radio when it is sitting at waist height on a desk. How much easier it would be if it was raised up. So here is a natty idea, the “Elevator” let’s you operate at a comfortable height. It is shown here with an FT-450 on top. The approx size is 24W x 14H x 25D (cm). It is made from brushed alloy and looks great. Non slip surfaces are on top and bottom. Minimum width of the radio needs to be approx 21cm. Call 01702 203353 for further information and availability.

Readers will know how impressed I have been with the new range of InnovAntennas made here locally not far from Hockley. They are the brainchild of Justin Johnson, G0KSC. My own QTH is not VHF friendly, situated as it is at the bottom of a hill. But no matter, I decided to try one of the smallest VHF antennas, the 2m 4el. LFA. To make matters worse, I could initially only get the antenna 15ft above ground, so in some directions the house shielded it and in all directions neighbour’ houses were not that far away. However, I hooked the radio up to a rather battered IC-706IIG and tuned around the bottom end of 2m on SSB and CW. Over the weekend I actually managed to work several G stations. The furthest north was in Leicester, perhaps 150km, and I managed a few ON and DF stations. All this on a very flat band and a poorly sited antenna. What did impress me was the excellent F/B ratio and extremely low side lobes. I was able to easily overcome any local noise issues provided they were not in the same direction as the antenna. The VSWR was almost flat and certainly no problem in operating across the 2MHz available bandwidth. Construction as I have said before on this blog, is superb and if you move up to the 6 element version and erect a “box” of four Yagis with the appropriate splitter, you are pretty well equipped for EME work. I did experience one annoying noise problem when I was working into western Europe, but this turned out to be an internal source in my home music studio. Once tracked down and turned off, the band was quiet!