Club members gathered together to operate in this year's RAC Winter Contest. We met in the lounge room of the Centennial Arena around 9am and began the task of setting up an HF antenna. We had hoped that a new permanently sited antenna would have been available but it was just received earlier this day and was looking quite nice in its shipping box. So once Jim arrived from picking up the new antenna, we were ready to string up his go kit antenna - a G5RV. As we were limited in placement options, we used the corner of the bulding we were in to hold up the antenna. It wasn't ideal but we got it operational fairly quickly.

We then set about getting a radio going but soon discovered that we hadn't brought a power source for Eric's radio which he normally used with his truck. Jim had a big Kenwood supply but its connector only fit an old Icom he had. Don offered to go home and get his go kit power supply with Anderson connectors and soon he was back and Eric's IC-7000 was on the air with Jim's antenna.

Meanwhile Eric had brought his tiny single board computer - a bigger brother to the Raspberry Pi. This one made by Samsung called - Odroid-UX3 lite - is a powerhouse in that it has 2GB of Ram memory and 8 cores. Eric purchased it to setup some digital links for the repeater. It was running Linux and had a radio logging program on it. All were quite impressed with its performance.and small size. 

During the few hours were were operating we made only a dozen contacts. The conditions did not favour our makeshift antenna deployment but we still had a good time working the few stations we heard.