Missed the boat?

At mid-night 22nd January a nine day amateur radio fund-raising event will start in aid of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, SOS Radio Week runs until 23:39 on the 30th. Anyone can participate, be they clubs, individuals, adults or youths. Simply register on the event web site, download a sponsorship form and raise at least £5. As an encouragement there are over £700 worth of prizes from Icom, the SRC Young Persons award, a radio from Martin Lynch and four antennas from Sigma Euro-Comm to give away.

Flintshire Raynet works closely with Flintshire RNLI and we were hoping to be running a special event station for the event, although any cash we raised would go directly to our local lifeboat team rather than in to some arbitrary distributed scheme. However the suggestion was a little late being proposed and then with the madness that is the Christmas preparations the forms for the special events callsign got put to one side and then finally ended up in the Christmas post. Assuming the forms got through the post unhindered and even if the weather had not probably backed things up, taking all the holidays in to consideration I am begining to think our application is at the bottom of a big pile on someones desk. Maybe I am being sceptical but it looks as though we may have just missed the boat. It will be a pity if we don't get it in time as we had a few Raynet and few radio club members who were keen to have a go. If we fail we will have to make sure we are ready for next year. I think this is an event which will go from strength to strength and unlike Raynet no one tells these guys to "leave it to the professionals".