Operation
The Club Callsigns are being used with /75 suffix for Members to celebrate the West Kent Club’s 75th Anniversary in 2023. Following the success of the first period on 15 – 30 April, to complete our Anniversary celebrations, we are running a second period of operation for 2 weeks from Saturday 14 to Sunday 29 October 2023.

Schedule

Click on the link above to see the current schedule, which opens in a new Tab. It can then be printed and/or downloaded from the tabs on the top right of the page.
Members are asked to contact Phil (secretary@wkars.org.uk) to book their slots ASAP. The slots are nominally 6 hours but you can operate for as long as you want. Also, don’t worry if the only slot you could use is already allocated because a Club callsign can be used simultaneously by more than one member on different bands. To promote activity, Members are requested to put that anniversary call on a DX Cluster (DXHeat | DXCluster & DX Research Tool or https://dxwatch.com/# ) or if they hear one calling. This is not a contest, so self-spotting is allowed!
To enable ALL members to participate, members with a Foundation or Intermediate Licence can be hosted or supervised by a Full Licensee , who signs your log, to use one of our Club Callsigns.
QSL cards will be exchanged via the RSGB Bureau, so please ensure you keep a log of your operation, remembering that times need to be UTC (so BST – 1 hour), preferably using a logging program so you can email it to the Secretary & Dave G4OTV or Les G6UBM as an ADIF or LOG file. If not, a paper log can be downloaded here which, on completion, can be scanned & emailed as a text file.

Useful Information to give out
1. The inaugural meeting of the Society, then called the West Kent Radio Society (without the word “Amateur”) was held with 12 people present on 7 April 1948 at Cluverden House, a large Victorian mansion that stood on St John’s Road in Tunbridge Wells. Founder members included Bert Allen G2U; a very active operator, designer & builder who wrote many technical articles for the RSGB and penned the monthly VHF column in the RSGB Bulletin, also becoming a RSGB Council member. He remained President of our Club for 21 years! The Club now meets on the 2nd Monday of the month at the Village Hall on Bidborough Ridge and has consistently had over 40 members in recent years.
2. The Society won the very first RSGB Affiliated Societies contest in 1950, and continues to compete in the Local Clubs division, consistently coming in the upper half of the field. In the monthly RSGB UK Clubs Contest series, a quarter of the membership participate in the 144MHz contests (currently 11th out of 36 Local Clubs, ahead of our neighbours Cray Valley at 18th) with some also regularly active in the 6m, 4m & 70cm contests. We also have a good showing in the 80m SSB contests. We regularly participate in the HF SSB & VHF Field Days hosted by a member in Matfield, where we held an Anniversary BBQ for members & their guests on 2 July, when we were also participating in the 24 hour VHF National Field Day contest.
3. In 1982 a group of society members set off for Galway in the Republic of Ireland to attempt something that had never been done before. This was to make the first ever transatlantic contact on the VHF 2 metre band. The attempt excited amateur radio operators across the UK and in North America. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the group, the attempt was foiled by the appalling weather conditions that were experienced in the Galway mountains. We run HF & VHF Special Event Stations with the call-sign GB2NW for Mills on the Air annually at Nutley Windmill on the Ashdown Forest.
4. Members’ interests are varied, with strong support for our regular 2m & 10m Nets but also for portable from local hills, QRP HF CW & VHF SSB, and vintage military radios but using different modes including computer generated digital modes; RTTY, PSK & FT8. We also have a fortnightly Workshop group, building home-brew designs and software solutions, and provide full one-to-one support to get would-be licencees through their studies and right onto the airwaves, although we’re not running our own courses at present.