On Mon 13th May we were fortunate to have Andrew Thomas of the UK Radio Astronomy Association give a fascinating presentation on amateur radio astronomy. He covered history, practical observing, geophysics and the sun, and several projects/kits available to the amateur radio astronomer. We had experienced the effects of the solar storm that had occurred only a few days previously – it wiped out the first day of our operations at Nutley Windmill. Andrew added some extra slides on measurements of the storm taken by his instruments, including an impressive graph of his magnetometer signals (shown below) – clearly illustrating the strongest magnetic storm for 20 years. Andrew is not an amateur radio operator, but there is obviously a cross-over between his area of interest and ours.

On the weekend of the 11th/12th May, WKARS once again set up our special event station at Nutley Windmill in the Ashdown Forest for ‘Mills on the Air weekend’. One of the sweeps of the mill had become detached last year but has now been restored.

As usual we used the callsign GB2NW for this event, and ran stations covering HF with SSB, CW and QRP FT8. The Saturday was something of a disappointment for us, as the intense solar disturbance that had occurred a day or so before had effectively knocked out worldwide shortwave communications – it did yield some spectacular aurora at night though! Due to this, the number of contacts we made on Saturday were somewhat reduced. The situation improved on the Sunday, where HF made a reasonable recovery.