A couple of days ago a friend told me about Bunkers on the Air which takes place throughout October this year. The idea is you set up within 1000m of and ROC Post (or the site of one as many have been demolished) to ‘activate’ it with 25 QSOs.
You can find these Royal Observer Corps Monitoring posts all over the UK. In the event of a nuclear attack members of the Royal Observer Corps would have deployed to their monitoring post and would noteand nuclear impact sites and report back to their group master post who in tern would report back to their regional HQ so that things like fallout could be calculated so that people could be warned.
The ROC Posts consist of an shaft with a ladder down to the post, a small room for a toilet. the main room was big enough for a desk and a couple of bunkbeds. the active crew would be expected to work in the monitoring posts for a few days after attack and would not expect to replaced by another crew.
Many of these posts were put out of use in 1968 and the remainder in the early 1990’s following the supposed end of the cold war.
Some of the posts, or the site of them, are on land accessible to the public and many are on private land and therefore not accessible so the rules of the Activation is that you need to be within 1000 meters of a post and you must be Portable or Mobile.
I hope to activate a few, at the very least the Exford Post which is about 2km from home and I can activate standing at the side of the road and 5 Barrows, there is no sign of any remains of the post but we know its near to the trig point, somewhere I have visited a few times, so I can activate that one pretty much stood on top of it.
I plan to activate the Exford Post on Sunday 1st right after the RSGB news at 0930BST (details of bunkers on the air will be in the news) on 2M so I can hopefully get s few contacts then, the rules allow us to do multiple activations to accumulate the required 25 QSOs. I may try Five Barrows later in the day using HF, M1ECC antennas are sponsoring the event to I will have a try using my Slidewinder Coil and whip.
But only if its not raining! 🙂
I will post on social media and will add to this post as I set up for the activations and will report progress here.
Thats the basic info and plan but if you want to know more feel free to contact me or comment below!
73
Mark