Until Oct 2010, I was teaching maths and science at Alexanders International School - housed in the beautiful Bawdsey Manor on the Suffolk coast. Bawdsey Manor is where Robert Watson-Watt and his teams developed radar during the 1936 to 1942 timeframe. For information, the airborne radar development team worked on the second floor of the white tower (left of picture, towards rear of building) during the time they were at Bawdsey. As the war progressed the work was moved away from Bawdsey to safer locations in other parts of the country. So it was very fitting and pleasing to be able to put on a radio station as part of National Science Week 2007
We used a G5RV antenna suspended between the two towers, and the rig was a Kenwood TS-440S, giving 100W into the feeder. Callsign used was GX6FS.
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While I was working as a Science technician at LHS, I worked with the Leiston Radio Club to promote radio within the school.
For National Science Week (Mar 14 - 18, 2005) we ran a station from the school during lunchtimes and afternoons. The station, GX6FS, uses the club call of the Leiston Radio Club - our thanks for the loan of this callsign!
Contacts have been established through the local repeater (GB3PO) on VHF, and across the UK on HF (80 and 40m) from Durham to Cornwall. On 18Mhz we have had QSO's with OH, ES, RV and LZ.
We used an FT897 and dual band co-linear antenna on VHF/UHF, and a TS-440S with an 80m dipole on HF.
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Although I left LHS as an employee in June 2005, I have continued to support regular after-school radio activities . As a result of the success of the 2005 event, permanent antennas were erected at the school - a set of nested dipoles for 80, 40 20 and 17m, and a tri-band colinear for 6m, 2m and 70cm. In conjunction with the Leiston Amateur Radio Club, we have continued to provide in-school activities during National Science Week each year - typically, between 60 and 100 students each year are introduced to communications based activities, such as audio and optical CW, semaphore and radio operation under the GX6FS callsign.
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One of the projects I have been running with my students during the summer is rockets. We have been using water and air propulsion to avoid any safety issues! Out of this we have extracted learning points regarding the measurement of altitude, using Newtons equations of motion and trigonometric methods. It has also provided an excellent practical exercise in students constructing their own rockets and then exploring how they behave when flown. Here are a few pictures of our efforts!
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page created 15.03.05 page last updated: 12.04.11
