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About Our Club

Club History

East Lancashire Radio Club history goes back many decades, but had fallen by the wayside when Bob G4GQP, James M0NWT and Kelvin 2EOFHR brought it back to life in 2013!

Initially based at Gannow Community Centre, Burnley, this was approved and registered as a RSGB Exam Centre, and with the dogged work of Bob, obtained the club call of G4ELR.

Helping new and those people progressing through to the hobby has always been a core value at East Lancs, and so providing training and exams a pleasure.

We’ve had many people pass and take up a licence, from Foundation through Advanced, and the club is rightly proud of these achievements.

Activities

The club has a number of thriving sub groups, including DX (sport radio), Repeaters - analogue and Digital, Construction, RAYNET and Morse code.  Each group really enjoys their section of the hobby but intermingle between groups.

Examples

In both 2016 and 2017 we fielded a team to enter the CQWW DX competition, which covers a 48 hour period from 12am GMT Friday night until 12am Monday morning!  Working in shifts of operators, we covered the whole period, and in 2016 obtained 4th in country!!  In 2017 One of our members obtained 1st in country as a rookie operator!

Another of our members G4MLB started the DMR digital revolution in 2015, providing the repeater GB7EL for the local Amateur community, in 2016 the club added a further repeater GB7RV to provide coverage across the Ribble Valley.  To interlink these repeaters M0NWI developed the Northern DMR Cluster, which now bridges 8 repeaters!

Adding to the local facilities, in 2017 M0NFI provided GB3PF, an analogue FM 70cm repeater from the Club building, also interlinked with HubNet, the largest AllStar network in the UK.  Along with a further 2 Simplex gateways, MB7INM (2M), and MB7ANM (4M), plus in 2018 built another gateway for use as MB7IVG (2M).

Construction is wide spread, from;

  • M1CEM building a quadrature SDR radio around a Teensy microcontroller
  • M0NFI the AllStar repeater controllers
  • G4MLB the UBIX and MMDVM
  • 2E0LGP an antenna analyser
  • M0NWT Arduino home control
  • The club has lots of knowledge and support to help any budding maker!
  • M0MMX is passionate about Morse code operation; he’s not even taken his mike out of its box!  He’ll help, teach and encourage anyone who wishes to try.

Northern DMR Cluster

Becoming disillusioned with the constant changes required to code-plugs for DMR radios, the club started to investigate if it could design its own DMR repeater network bridge.  After a number of tests and trials, we dropped onto DMRLink by K0USY, and used this Open Source IPSC stack as the basis for our own bridge.

After some rapid development of logging, database and webpages for live monitor, we launched in May 2016.

Today we have the ability to interlink with MMDVM as well as Motorola, and invite other keepers to talk to us about linking.

DMR Timeline

  • March 2016 – Over a heated discussion at ELRC, a decision is made to investigate our own DMR repeater bridge.
  • April 2016 – DMRLink System goes into testing with a number of MotoTRBO repeaters.
  • May 2016 - GB7HS, GB7HX, GB7TD, GB7MR and GB7LE move over from BrandMeister.
  • Jun 2016 - We link to the OpenDMR hub, allowing access to the DMR-MARC talkgroups.
  • Jul 2016 - GB7EL joins the cluster.
  • Aug 2016 - GB7RV joins the cluster.
  • Aug 2016 - GB7HM joins the cluster.

 

Repeaters directly supported by the club and members;

The Club today

In March 2023, the club merged with Burnley & District Amateur Radio Club.

From April 2023 we are based at;

Higham Village Hall, 

Higham Hall Rd,

Higham,

Burnley

BB12 9EU

The club does not charge a joining fee, nor an annual subscription, we do ask for a donation of £2 per attendance, which covers the costs of the room hire, plus the refreshments.

All are welcome and will be made to feel welcome.