22 May 2025

Goodbye 8m

 Today, I took down my 8m dipole. This means I can no longer go on 8m TX. It marks the end of my campaign and experiments on the band. Everything I sought to find out has been completed and I refuse to pay £50 a year to continue. Instead I am QSYing to 6m and 10m.

It is a sad day, but life is too short to continuing my battle with the RSGB and OFCOM. In my view, their attitude is disgraceful.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

One could say £1 a week isn't much to pay for access, Life's too short to get wound up about it.. You should have kept your 8M aerial up for monitoring the band

Roger G3XBM said...

No, I disagree. Years ago OFCOM just issued a Notice Of Variation to my amateur radio licence for VLF experiments. I totally refuse to pay ANY more money to do research. I am not "wound up" at all. I shall just not go on 8m for the foreseeable future.

Paul said...

Sorry to see you leave 40MHz Roger and I'd like to thank you for your help when we first applied for the T+I licences. I've re-applied for mine, I don't mind paying the £50 and I've had more enjoyment out of putting the UK on the map on this band than I've had in 30+ years of amateur radio.

I'm not going to get worked up over the RSGB, we clearly have very different opinions on allowing UK amateurs access to 8M but in my opinion they are presiding over a slowly dying hobby and should seek every bit of support they can muster.

Paul