Shropshire's radio hams talk on a global scale

From a tiny shack on the outskirts of Telford, the lines of international communication are opened.

Sitting before an array of knobs and flashing dials, as well as some seemingly random equipment which includes home-made circuit boards, a soldering iron and a ‘bits’ tray, radio ham Martyn Vincent gets a ‘contact’ - and within seconds is talking to a stranger called Robert 600 miles away in Norway.

Who needs Skype?

Martyn, station number G3UKV, is vice chairman of what has been officially declared Britain’s top amateur radio club – the flourishing 40-strong Telford & District Amateur Radio Society.

At a time when many hobby groups are dwindling – including radio ham clubs – the award, from Radio Society of Great Britain, acknowledges in part the group’s engagement with other community circles and its eagerness to attract and train younger members.

“As it is with many hobby groups, a lot of clubs have vanished,” says Martyn. “We have to get more young people to join. In 1991 we started courses enabling young people to get their licence as all radio hams need one of these to operate.”

Active in broadcasting the wonders of radio to a wider audience, the club also runs the highly successful Hamfest at Ironbridge’s Enginuity museum, which attracts around 1,000 visitors.

Although the lot of a radio ham is, by its nature, remote and singular, and it might seem easier to communicate via the airwaves, some 45 of its members meet in the flesh every week at Little Wenlock village hall to share tips and offer support.

There is a healthy, competitive edge to radio hamming, which is demonstrated when club members decamp, with their antennae and dials, to the Long Mynd for competitions such as National Field Day.

“We are trying to get the most contacts with stations over the biggest distances,” Martyn explains.

But members’ appearance in a field with antennae and trunks full of tackle often has onlookers leaping to wild conclusions.

“People come up and say ‘are you SAS?’ I suppose it does look a bit covert,” says Martyn.

Fellow member Simon Bird adds: “It can be quite competitive. I do train for competitions - I listen to very, very weak signals.”

We are living in the age of social networking, using technological communications. Facebook, Twitter and the like allow us to talk to people around the world for next to nothing. But perhaps the analogue forerunner to all these digital ‘thingy-magics’ is the humble radio set, which Martyn describes as “the beginning of the long story of technology”.

The beginning for retired headteacher Martyn came in the 1960s. The joy of amateur radio, he says, is in the fact that communication is made possible on equipment that is home-made. Or, as he puts it, “home-brewed”.

“When you make a contact, that is magic – especially when it is on equipment that you have put together yourself using your soldering iron and parts you have sourced, say from eBay.”

Martyn built his first crystal radio set as a nipper. “I was sent to my room and thought ‘I’m going to get the better of my parents on this one, so I built a crystal set with a wire out of the window and connected to an earth through the water pipe and I listened to the Light Programme.”

Contact with such ‘secret’ worlds had further-reaching effects. Hearing the terribly proper BBC English spoken by radio presenters back in the day, Martyn adds: “I learned to round my vowels!”

In any case, the radio ham is not someone who doggedly sits in his shack before consoles of crackly dials, fearful of digital technology. Many use the internet. Some use an app on their iPad which turns their futuristic tablets into radio receivers.

“I use the internet,” says Simon who has a extendible aerial fitted to his van, meaning he can whip it out for a contact any time.

“I was sitting on the car park of the Severn Gorge pub with my hand unit, talking to people on the other side of the world.

“A chap once came up to me and asked about it. I said I was talking to a bloke from Newcastle. He said ‘Newcastle-upon-Lyme?’ No, Newcastle in America.”

But members use any radio technologies available to them in order to communicate, including Morse code, voice, keyboards, data modes and even TV transmissions.

It can be a consuming passion for some hams. After all, contacts in different time zones are available to enthusiasts day and night should they not be able to sleep.

Martyn adds: “It’s all out there in the ether. Radio is magic in one way.”

Simon Bird’s interest in radio was piqued in 1957 when his grandfather presented him with an old valve radio. “And suddenly I was hearing things like the Voice of America, and BBC Radio Delhi in posh voices,” he says.

Later in the 1980s he got into CB radio and, through a fellow enthusiast, he made loud-and-clear contact with Telford and District Amateur Radio Society.

“It’s the variation of contacts that makes it interesting - you can go from talking to a coal miner in Merthyr Tidfyl one moment to someone like the actor Sir Brian Rix the next.

“We used to talk to the Russian space station Mir. All the guys on the space stations are radio hams.

“I had a contact with the King of Jordan. It was a hello-goodbye, a so-called ‘rubber stamp’, but still. You never know who you are going to talk to next.”

For more information about Telford & District Amateur Radio Society visit www.tdars.org.uk or contact Martyn Vincent on 01952 255416.