Minutes of the 2011 Annual General Meeting
by Richard Urwin, G6RRJ

Present: MOHEL M6CBM 2EOSWT M6PTO G1UOZ 
M6BYL G7LRS M1GPO G3TQF GOATR G7DPU G1ICI MOCJW G4AF G6RR

Apologies: M1NAS, M1EXO, M1EWH, G8OBP, G7RXS, G7TZU
The Chairman welcomed everyone

The minutes of 2011 AGM were published in LENS. No amendments were offered. The minutes were proposed G6RRJ, Seconded MOCW. Accepted unanimously.

Treasurer's report, G7RXS
G7RXS is stepping down as Treasurer and Membership Secretary. The Chairman read his report in his absence.

First of all I would like to say thank you once again to Sandra, M1EXO, for examining and approving our accounts. As I say every year, the 5-year format which she introduced some years ago gives me, and indeed everyone else, a valuable tool to enable us to See exactly how We are doing. By looking at each line we get an immediate five year picture of any particular item of expenditure or income thus alerting the committee to any trend that is welcome or that needs attention. Thank you Sandra.

The first thing we always tend to look at when viewing accounts is the surplus of income over expenditure or the deficit - more colloquially known as profit or loss. This year with all the problems we have had, namely the total loss of any income from the now defunct Leicester Amateur Radio Show, increasing electricity costs and a somewhat patchy  and sporadic response to the increase in the Subccription rate, I was expecting to have to report a loss for the year but I am very pleased to be able to tell you that we made a small, very small profit of £12. In all the circumstances this can be Considered a satisfactory outcome for the year.

[The Chairman added, that a lot of this is thanks to penny-pinching tactics by the committee and not only have they been generous of their time, they have also been generous of their money in that very little in the way of expenses has been claimed this year.]

Looking at the accounts I would make the following comments by way of amplification:-

* SUBSCRIPTIONS looking at the total subscription income this has only increased in total by £21 in spite of the increase in the basic level. There are several possible reasons for this which will be detailed later in my Membership Report.


* ELECTRICITY We have at last got a smart meter installed which should prevent estimated meter readings in future. The accounts show a reduction of some £133 on last year but of course global fuel costs are still increasing and at the next bi-annual tariff review it is almost inevitable We shall face a further increase in our running costs.


[The chairman added that G7 RXS has been aided and abetted in this by Mike, GOATR, who happens to work for the electricity people, so he is keeping a close eye on which tariff we are on etc. So thanks also to Mike.]

* RENT & RATES Our annual rent has been unchanged at £60 for several years but of course we have rates to pay on top of that. A Government initiative to encourage small businesses was the introduction of SBRR (Small business rate relief. Last year this had the effect of reducing our rate bill by half and further tinkering with SBRR resulted in us paying nothing this year, actually we received a refund of E9. Small figures but nevertheless very WelCOme.

* INSURANCE Both of Our Insurers have declined to continue taking business and we are in the midst of negotiating new cover. Whilst I do not think it was

actually said, it is fairly obvious that the reasons for this were financial. We are currently in the process of negotiating new cover but I am fairly certain that it will be at an increased premium.

* REPAIRS & RENEWALS This has been our saving grace during the last year with a total expenditure of NIL. Sincere thanks are due to Nigel and his engineering team and helpers for this tremendous achievement. Everything has been kept working excellently at no cost to the Group. Similarly thanks are due to our beacon keeper and TV repeater keeper for their efforts in eliminating costs.


AS I said earlier Over the last 12 months Our total cash balances have increased by just £12 and we cannot afford to be complacent. In the next 12 months we shall certainly have to face increasing electricity costs, more than likely increased insurance Costs and it will be miraculous if we can have another period of no expenditure on repairs and renewals.

That completes my report on the last year's financial activities. As you probably know, for health and business reasons, I am not standing for office again. I have enjoyed the last 15 years or so as an official of the Group but all things have to come to an end. I wish the Group all the very best for a successful future.

John Senior G7RXS

The Chairman proposed a vote of thanks to John for his sevice to the repeater group over many years. MOCW seconded. Passed unanimously,


Questions on the accounts


No questions.

Elen MOHEL reported on her research into Solar energy.

I looked into it. I got a Company that was going to give us the solar panels for free, but they did have to come out to the site and have a look to see what was needed, and when they came out, although the site was a perfect site, the bit where they needed to do the concreting, they said they couldn't do it; the cost would have been about £4,000 for the slab of concrete that they would have to put up there. They did say that the alternative there would be wind 
power, and that would be a perfect site, if you could find a company to do that.

The Chairman noted that one problem was that the site is in a Conservation area, and We did have trouble getting permission for the mast and aerials. So any solar or wind installation could be subject to planning permission.

Another possibility might be to charge a battery on the Economy 7 tariff and use the battery power during the day. There would be a significant capital investment in any of these technologies, and the committee would have to consider the pay-back period carefully.

Equipment sales didn't bring us in much last year, but we did two events during the year. One was at the Leicester Radio Society, which just about covered our costs, but much more successfully, we went to Rugby car-boot and made a profit for the group of £131. We took much more than that, but a significant fraction of the sales were of materials we were selling on behalf of silent keys, for which the group receives 10% of the selling price.

Membership report, G7RXS read by the Chairman

You may recall that our main source of income, apart from subscriptions, used to be our annual cheque from the Leicester Amateur Radio Show. I told you all last year that with the loss of this main income stream the Group would find the way ahead very difficult. I also said that the Group would have to look to make savings wherever possible and that to maintain our income to enable us to pay our substantial running costs subscriptions would have to rise.

Your committee are very much aware that raising the subscription level is not just as simple as it may seem and it can have mixed results. Some members feel on principle that the new rate is too high and simply do not renew at all and some continue paying at the old rate, especially those paying by Bankers Order, and some opt to pay at the concessionary rate.


The new full rate is £20 and the new concessionary rate is therefore £15. I doubt if when the rate was increased anyone on the committee realised that the new concessionary rate was the same as the old full rate so that when someone now pays me £15 how do I know if they are paying the old rate for some reason or claiming the concessionary rate. Nobody ever tells me! The present membership renewal system as it has evolved is quite cumbersome. Firstly I send out reminders to all those members whose subscription expires at the end of the current month. To those not paying a reminder is sent and to those who have still not paid after the expiry of the 2 months days of grace a final reminder is sent. Of course those who do pay then receive a new membership card in the post. I do have a personal sponsor for postage costs (which your new membership secretary may not have) but you will realise from the foregoing that the renewal system is somewhat consuming of time and effort and therefore I do not want to see another stage added by asking people why they pay the reduced rate or chasing then to see why they have not renewed. It is interesting to note that in the last two years I have had only one member tell me he would not be renewing as he was giving up the hobby as it had changed beyond all recognition from Amateur Radio as he knew it.


Sadly the last increase has not had the effect we had hoped as if we look at the accounts this years figure is only some £21 more than last year. Unfortunately it is always difficult to be too specific about membership numbers as there are always cheques in the post. We only receive our bank statements Once a month on Or about the 10th month and it is only from these that I get knowledge of, and can process, payments received by Bankers Order or PayPal.


At the present moment we have a membership of 49 which includes 3 in the days of grace allowed for renewal and 6 non paying members ( 1 President and 5 life members.

Engineering Manager's Report, G4AFJ

I don't have anything to say except that I have been up the mast a couple of times during the year. We had a problem with the 70cm and 2m colinear that was on the top of the mast, last summer, and we thought that the problem was with the feeder, because it seemed that 2m was perfectly OK but 70cm was a bit peculiar. We tested the feeder and that seemed OK, SO We Came to the Conclusion that the aerial must be faulty. We replaced the aerial and that was alright. We also replaced the top colinear 
with a devoted 6m aerial, which was alright until about three or four weeks ago, when we had some high winds and it basically fell to pieces and was flapping in the breeze. We went up to site one or two Sundays ago and replaced it with one exactly the same, but hopefully more rugged. It had been reinforced. Hopefully that will last, and you are noticing that GB3UM is a bit improved from what it was when the aerial was flapping in the breeze and had to be turned off.

The other matter concerns the TV repeater which by all accounts receives extremely little use but has been operating in beacon mode all the time. Whereas the other repeaters chime up every five minutes or whatever, and tell you that they are there, the TV repeater has had a caption up all the time 24 hours a day, which seems, when you are talking about electricity, plainly ridiculous. So our out-going beacon keeper G8OBP has suggested that now is the time to put it into what you would call more normal beacon mode, ie chimes up every two minutes or five minutes Or Whatever and not to be transmitting all the time.

We still don't have the 3.4GHz beacon working; we are still waiting for that to be rebuilt. The other beacons continue to work, and in fact in February or March we've had reports from France of the 10GHz beacon. So when the conditions are right it does do the distance.


Chairman's Report, G4AFJ


It has been a fairly quiet year; we were pleased to Welcome Ellen to the Committee, and We did have a little bit of confusion caused by me trying to change the evening of the committee meeting to Tuesdays, and compounded with that we decided that we didn't really need a meeting every month, so we'd have it every two months. The previous year the weather was so bad that we had to keep cancelling the meeting. It has been a quiet year; there hasn't been a lot to do, and obviously when you get into the winter time you can't do much on site either. Things have been working reasonably well, with the usual hiccups, but Nigel has attended to them. We've had things like time clocks not being right When We went on to Summer time, and We had a major power cut up at site; the main had blown up outside the site, so the repeater was off on Sunday morning when we wanted to read the news. It was several hours before electricity was restored. But 
apart from that, all repeaters and beacons have been doing well.

We had a proposal for a 70cm beacon. Those of you who are into 70cm sideband and DXing will know that we haven't got a lot of 70cm beacons any more because they used to be up TV masts and of course they wanted silly money for the aerials to be up there. The RSGB took the view that they would cease to support them. That meant that GB3SUT, which was on the Sutton Coldfield mast and GB3MY 
also succumbed. Those two were the "local beacons" that you tuned in to. Now if you want to find out if your rig works on 70cm, you can tune to the repeater or you can listen for something like GB3BSL which is down in Bristol. So we thought that it would be a useful addition to put on a 70cm beacon, but it is not that simple; 70cm is never a simple band to get anything licensed on. They want to change the beacon sub-band on 70cm, because the current band is something like 432.800 to 432.950 and they wanted to move it down in the same way that it is on 2m. The IARU Region One, some years ago decided that they would have the 2m beacon band at about 144.400, and as a result the beacons had to change their frequencies in the UK, from the 144.800-950 slot. Things are simple on 2m because we are the primary user on the band. On 70cm we are not the primary user on the band and you have to go through the MoD, and the man at the MoD is not very quick at sorting these things out. The other problem is that is the MoD do feed anything back to the clerks at Ofcom, the clerks don't understand RF. So if the MoD say this one can't work here; it's got to go somewhere else, it doesn't really mean a lot to the clerks and they often don't relay the message back. It would be much better if you could go and see the MoD man. Anyway, this 70cm beacon band: they want to move it down to the 432.400 slot, but of course it's tied up with the MoD, and the MoD now aren't going to do anything until the Olympics are out of the way. Maybe when it does happen we will be told we can put our beacon on somewhere, but we haven't done any paperwork for this at all. All we have done is to say we would be interested in doing it.
We have a long-standing APRS project on. We got as far as doing some tests to see if it could coexist with GB3CF, because APRS as many of you will be aware is on 144.800, and CF receives on 145.000, which is only 200kHz off it's input. So we thought it might  require extra filtering. However a test with a colinear further down the mast and CF on the top colinear suggested that the problems were minimal if the APRS system ran low power. It probably only needs to run low power anyway because the site is quite good. We've had an ex-member of the repeater group who was, at One stage duite interested in all this, but he seems to have lost interest. Another gentleman who I have had some dealings with did offer us a complete box, so we would just literally put this box at the site and programme it with our callsign, but he has as yet not come up with the goods. If there is anyone in the assembled multitude Who is keen On APRS and knoWS all about it and knows how to do a node or whatever, make yourself known to uS because We've got the site, we've got the willingness to do it, we've got the aerials, we've got the feeder, we need a box and we need to programme it and we need to progress some paperwork. (Which won't be a problem because it's a primary band anyway.)

Election of Officers

All Officers and other Committee members are due to retire at the AGM. We also have a three year rule for officers as Well, and most of the Officers have exceeded the three year rule, including the Chairman. We have the secretary who will be on his third year if he is re-elected. The treasurer G7RXS has said he is standing down, so we are definitely looking for a treasurer. The engineering manager, Nigel, M1 NAS, has said that he is prepared to carry on. The site manager, MOCW, will carry on for another year if elected, with the proviso that he spends some time in Australia each year. There are five other committee members, who are at present MOHEL, G8OBP, G3TQF, GOATR and M1GPO. MOHEL

keeper, and he has said that he has done in excess of 25 years. The TV repeater was licensed in 1984. It was the brainchild of Paul Elliot, G4MOS, and it was the first TV repeater to become operational in the country. After about two or three years Paul lost interest in it, and since then G8OBP has looked after it. He has said that he wishes to now step down.
A vote of thanks to Dave, G8OBP, for his Service for all those years. Proposed G4AF), Seconded M1GPO,
passed unanimously,
G3TOF is our microwave beacon expert, and so he is usually co-opted onto the committee. Mike GOATR is an elected Committee member and is the webmaster and one of the voices of GB2RS every Sunday morning at nine o'clock. Gordon M1GPO turns up to reset the clocks and works on site, is an elected member of the Committee.

The chairman thanked all the members of the committee for their work during the past year.


G4AFJ was willing to stand for re-election as Chairman, nobody else was proposed. P
roposed M1GPO, Seconded MOCIW passed unanimously.
G6RRJ was willing to stand for re-election as Secretary, nobody else was proposed. Proposed G4AFJ, Seconded M1GPO passed unanimously.
G7RXS was not willing to stand for re-election as Treasurer. M1GPO was willing to stand. Proposed MOCJW, Seconded G4AF.J. passed unanimously.
M1NAS was willing to stand for re-election as Engineering Manager, nobody else was proposed. Proposed G4AJF, Seconded MOCJW. Passed unanimously.
M0CJW was willing to stand for re-election as Site Manager, nobody else was proposed. Proposed G4AFJ, Seconded G6RRJ. Passed unanimously

Of the existing elected members, MOHEL and GOATR were willing to stand for re-election. Proposed G4AFJ, Seconded M1GPO.


G3TQF was not willing to stand for election, preferring to be co-opted. M6CBM was willing to stand for election Proposed M1GPO, Seconded MOHEL passed unanimously


Vote of thanks to Sandra M1EXO, our accounts examiner. Proposed G4AFJ, Seconded M1GPO. Passed unanimously

Any Other business

No business raised

The chairman closed the emeting at 21:13.

Open Forum

M1GPO suggested moving the due date for subscriptions to a single date. The meeting felt that would mean either the group or the members were out of packet. Ways around that were suggested, and the committee should examine it.

M6CBP suggested IRLP and D-Star. D-Star was considered by the committee when it first came out and was found to be expensive. IRLP has been investigated in previous years and has fallen through, but any new interest would be welcomed..