GB3PT, Thornhill site
on the BT tower near M27 junction 7 (North of Southampton).
SU472129

Tests in February 2003.

On Monday 24th February, Giles, G1MFG, set up equipment at the proposed location for the GB3PT repeater on the BT site at Thornhill.

To put these tests into perspective Giles had previously made these comments:
" ...The performance will be substantially poorer than can be expected from the final version of GB3PT because the following have to be overcome:

This implies that the Rx performance will be somewhere in the region of 15dB down on GB3PT. Or, to put it another way, the final receive setup will be about 3 P-grades better. But at least this test should work, albeit for One Night Only (as they say).

On the Tx side, the ERP will be somewhere in the region of 15-20W, quite a bit lower than the 100W we hope to be licensed for at GB3PT. So not only will you get into PT much better, you'll also see it on average 1-2P grades better. Putting that into context, if you can see weak syncs on Monday and get weak syncs in, you should get about a P3 both ways on the repeater. And that's not bad.... "

Here are the results as seen by me:-

G7SEZ/P

A view of most of the equipment that Giles had set up for these tests.

Note the Picture In Picture at the top left. This was normally the G7SEZ shack camera while the main picture was the received signal.

Here is a selection, in alphabetical order, of the signals I received from G7SEZ/P when it was transmitting received signals.
Signal strength from Thornhill varied during the tests causing picture variations that were not due to the originating signal (into Thornhill).
All pictures,including the one above, are off my monitor screens (one produces vertical bands on the left), taken with a hand held camera.

G0GMK G0LFI G0LPP
G0GMK, Dave, in Holbury. G0LFI, Frank, in Fratton. G0LPP, Chas, in Portsmouth.

G1APD G3KXE G7BVK
G1APD, Allen, in West End. G3KXE, Eric, in Bitterne. G7BVK, Steeve, in Andover.

G8CKN G8LES M0JTT
G8CKN, Roy, in Medstead. G8LES, Mike, in Four Marks. M0JTT, John, Swaythling.

I believe Len, G7GNA, was also on but, sorry, I didn't get a picture.

Thanks Giles for all the thought and hard work you put into preparing for and running these tests.
Thanks also to Howard, G3NZL, for being such a patient and effective net controller.

Tests in July 2002.

This off-screen picture, was taken on 22/7/02 when Noel, G8GTZ, paid a quick visit to the site during his lunch break! This PIC caption generator was in B&W but the camera pictures had been in colour.

Thornhill
Some radar interference lines are just visible on this picture.