Radio Checks

[marisca]

Spent Monday and yesterday getting from Belfast City Centre to Gourock with the night spent in phosphorescence rich Whiting Bay - it makes nocturnal micturation an art form! The temptation to turn off the radio entirely was getting strong mostly due to the frequent squelch noise from distant broadcasts - Stornoway, Liverpool, Malin Head and Belfast CG were all clear but their callers weren't. However, what was apparent was the large number of "distorted and barely readable" responses from the Belfast CG to radio checks - no, not all to the same caller. Maybe my disdain for such calls is misplaced and that radios are not likely to remain fully functional from one day to the next or maybe they deteriorate over the season. But what do the callers do with the information? Cancel the sail and fix the radio until the check is "loud and clear"?

[sahona]

Hopefully they're installing/repairing something and will test until they get it right... I've just added a spare set to the "going back" bag, as the keypad on the existing set has lost function on a row, and I don't want to "fix" it without having a backup handy.
The big pi$$off this holiday so far has been numpties using chan 10 which is also the CG broadcast chan for the area we were in, so either the squelch had to be dangerously high, or we had to monitor a less relevant chan.