International Marconi Day ( I M D ) is on the 26th April, a celebration of Guglielmo Marconi’s Birthday.

As usual the station will be hosting the event to represent Marconi’s Brean Down site. On the 18th May 1897 the furthest wireless communication at the time from Lavernock point in South Wales to Brean Down Somerset was accomplished at a distance of 14 Kms.

Marconi spent a fair amount of time in this area and his influence has led to street’s to be named after him in Portishead, Clevedon, and Weston- Super -Mare. There’s even a plaque on the wall of the Italian Garden’s in the center of Weston dedicated to Marconi and his achievement’s.

As we are a contest group we run this event in the only way we know, that is to work as many stations that we can in the 24 hrs of the event.

I’m pretty sure that we make more qso’s than any other IMD station so I guess between 2.5 - 3k would be in order depending on propagation. So if you call in and expect a long chat please don’t be offended if we log you and quickly move on to the next op.

We will be operating CW, SSB and RTTY but as we at G6PZ love CW more than any other mode it will be a good bet to find us there in preference. After all Marconi did’nt have SSB ! Ok that was a bit tongue in cheek but we will be mixing it up a bit between the modes.

We like I M D so when you hear GB6MD please give us a call. For further details please see the IMD website.

http://www.gb4imd.org.uk/

Paul G6PZ