Wirral & District Amateur Radio Club
Newsletter Library
This is a historic collection of all our club newsletters with many seeing the first light of day for more than two decades. For the more mature members amongst us, these will be pure nostalgia and sadly of course, a number of the callsigns are no longer with us. It's interesting that while the technology has changed, the format of club life is very similar. All of the original newsletters were produced in B5 format with the first seven being produced by various early members.
Once the club settled down, "AIRWAVE 325" was chosen to be the title of the club newsletter, reflecting members prolific use of 145.325MHz as the club net/mobile frequency. Almost all these were produced by Gerry G8TRY using a typewriter, and after cut and pasting the photographs they were then photocopied and distributed to the membership via Royal Mail. These copies have now all been scanned, cleaned up and imported into Adobe Acrobat and converted to pdf files. Airwave 325's were usually around 24/34 pages so the files are large-ish and will take a few minutes to download depending on your connection speed .. but the short wait is well worth it. Grateful thanks to Gerry G8TRY for supplying all the early copies.
The early 1980's saw various models of home computers beginning to appear and experimentation immediately began in sending data over the radio. At that point a few Update 325 news-sheets appeared, put together from articles transmitted on S13. The use of a dot matrix printer meant the first run of the ribbon was fine but after that it just became fainter and fainter and a couple of pages here are not as easy to read as we would like. These early news-sheets were able to slot in between the big job of producing a full newsletter. During the 1990's it became difficult to find time to produce a full newsletter and we managed instead with just distributing a simple Calendar sheets to club members. It wasn't until January 2001 that the newsletter as we know it today was re-started using the latest state of the art desktop publishing software with liberal use of colour photographs helping to make a very attractive, readable and varied information sheet in pdf format. Another First .. was we started to distribute these as an e-mail attachment to some 25 members at no photo-copying, printing, paper or postage cost to the club. This distribution figure is now over 100, including a number of ex. WADARC members around the world with only a handful needing to be printed and sent 'snail-mail'.
The present day Newsletter. "Airwave 70.4125" reflects the frequency in (MHz) which a number of club members monitor and are able to respond to calls whether at home or mobile. 4m has proved to be a quiet yet useful mobile band which also hosts the local Echolink node. (Click on 'Local Echolink' on the left menu for more information).
Just highlight and click on the month of the file you wish to read. Remember it might take a few minutes to download depending on your connection speed but the menu will remain on the left hand side of your screen, so when you have finished, either click on 'Newsletters' and choose another one to read or select another item from the menu.
With the continued penetration of the internet and it's benefits in the shack, most club members now keep up to date on club activities via this website. So, sadly the 'read in your hand' Newsletter we used to produce has taken a back seat for now. It may reappear .. we will just have to see .. but at least you can enjoy those we used to produce when it was the main source of information.
Enjoy ...
Month |
Year |
CLUB Newsletter/Magazines |
Spring | 2010 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 |
Summer | 2009 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 |
January | 2009 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 |
2008 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 | |
2008 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 | |
Autumn | 2007 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 |
Summer | 2007 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 |
January | 2007 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 |
August | 2006 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.4125 |
April | 2006 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
January | 2006 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
2005 |
Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 | |
2005 |
Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 | |
2005 |
Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 | |
2004 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 | |
July | 2004 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
April | 2004 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
February | 2004 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
September | 2003 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
May | 2003 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
January | 2003 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
September | 2002 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
May | 2002 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
February | 2002 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
August | 2001 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
April | 2001 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
January | 2001 | Club Newsletter Airwave 70.450 |
Autumn | 1994 | Update 325 News Sheet |
Autumn | 1993 | Update 325 News Sheet |
Summer | 1991 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
Spring | 1990 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
Autumn | 1987 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
Autumn | 1986 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
Spring | 1985 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
Autumn | 1984 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
July | 1984 | Update 325 News Sheet |
Spring | 1984 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
November | 1983 | Update 325 News Sheet |
October | 1983 | Update 325 News Sheet |
September | 1983 | Update 325 News Sheet |
Summer | 1983 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
July | 1983 | Update 325 News Sheet |
Spring | 1983 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
Autumn | 1982 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
Spring | 1982 | Airwave 325 Club Magazine |
Winter | 1981 | The Club's 7th Newsletter |
Summer | 1981 | The Club's 6th Newsletter |
Spring | 1981 | The Club's 5th Newsletter |
December | 1980 | The Club's 4th Newsletter |
August | 1980 | The Club's 3rd Newsletter |
April | 1980 | The Club's 2nd Newsletter |
February | 1980 | The Club's 1st Newsletter |
Browse the original Old Photographs of the Newsletters from years 1983 - 1987, many in colour.
(Acrobat Reader is FREE if you need it
to read pdf documents)