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My photographs from the meeting are on Flickr (also geotagged). Pictures of Munich and ham-related activity are public, but other pictures can only be seen by my friends on Flickr.
WWYC Meeting Participants at Wertachtal Transmitter Site
I arrived at Munich Airport, having flown from London Stansted, for the fourth annual WWYC Meeting. The venue for the meeting was The Tent. This is a wonderful location, very cheap, with the ability for groups such as us to rent a partitioned part of a marquee. Beds with blankets and sheets were supplied, and there was a very new shower and washblock. Breakfast and dinner were served, again very cheaply, and were mainly organic. We even had a couple of barbeques. The Tent is very tolerant of youth groups, with no curfew before 1am, a campfire and the local Bavarian beer is sold on site.
That evening, we went to Munich Technical University's RF Technology Department's lecture theatre for the official start of the meeting, with presentations about the two WWYC operations from Litchenstein in RDXC contest and XF4DL by DF7TH. We also went up to the top floor of the building where, in a very small room (perhaps only 5m long and 1.5m wide), the amateur radio station DL0TUM can be found.
This was our main sightseeing-day. We firstly took an hour-long coach ride to Deutsche Telekom (T-Systems Media&Broadcast)'s Wertachtal transmitter site, about forty kilometres west of Munich. The site was originally constructed for the 1972 Munich Olympics, and is still used today by many short-wave broadcasters, although they have recently lost Deutsche Welle. There are 16 500kW transmitters, of which five are now capable of transmitting DRM. The antennas are 74 directional curtains, facing various directions (predominantly the former USSR, given that it was built in the Cold War) along three arms from the central building. The two arms facing North-East and South-East are each over 1km long and can easily be seen on this Google Maps picture. A large room contains a fully automated switching system, so that any transmitter can be linked to any antenna, an impressive piece of kit when you consider that the coaxial 'cable' has to be air-spaced pipeline about 50cms diameter at this power level! Another room houses the transmitters and power supplies. Each transmitter requires 5kV, and an electrical substation is on the outskirts of the site provides this. Perhaps most impressive of all was the automated tuning system. At 59 minutes past the hour, the transmitter would cut off automatically, power-down, change to a different frequency, retune the antenna (lots of knobs and metres whizzing about on the front of the cabinet at this point), a computer would cue playout from a different source and the transmitter would then power back up again, ready to commence transmission at the top of the hour. The process took 49 seconds when we were there. The playout computer can take source either from FTP, CD, ISDN or satellite link and also can cue MP3s of ident signals for the start of a broadcast.
After having a traditional Bavarian lunch in a restaurant by the Ammersee Lake at Herrsching, we went for a walk up the hill to the nearby Andechs monastery, where we saw the very ornate church and then went into the beer garden to have some of the monastery's own beer (Andechs beer is widely available throughout Bavaria). That evening, we had some more presentations back at The Tent: Modern Hamradio Techniques by S56A and the annual WWYC summer report by 9A6XX, which once again confirmed that we are getting older and need more young members.
Today was mainly spend looking around Munich city. In the morning, we had free time to do our own sightseeing, whilst a few of the participants took the FCC exams for American licences, but this was somewhat marred by heavy rain, so a few of us just sat in a café until lunch. Lunch was a small packed-lunch which we had agreed to eat in the Odeonsplatz, which was made somewhat more interesting by the unexpected arrival of the Munich Gay Pride march! In the afternoon, we were treated to a more formal sightseeing tour of the city. We then returned to The Tent, briefly, before heading back into the city centre for a pizza. We then split up to do our own thing that night, and a few of us went to the Atomic Café nightclub. When we left, just before 4am, we decided to go to a 24-hour Burger King for a bit of food before returning to The Tent. One of the guys decided to go in shouting 'CQ Burger, CQ Burger', which drew a few odd looks from other customers.The man in front of us in the queue then started to ask us about the meaning of this, whilst his girlfriend tried to dissuade him from further investigation. Anyway, explaining callsign formats after a night out, in a queue in Burger King was a rather surreal experience. The night got even odder, however, when we boarded the night tram to find another group of WWYCers also making their return journey. When they saw that we were eating, they decided to find food, too, and persuaded us to get off the tram when we passed a Subway. Of course it was shut at that time of night, so we then had to walk back to The Tent, as the next tram wasn't for another 22 minutes.
After a fairly leisurely morning, we went to the Deutsches Museum. This is an excellent exhibition, over six floors, of science and technology. There is a very large maritime and aeronautical navigation section, hands-on chemistry experiments, and physics and astronomy displays. One of the highlights, which we almost missed as it is in the basement, was the mining exhibition, where you walk through time in a series of underground tunnels, showing how mining technology has developed. There was also a rather fun 'High Voltage demonstration', where lightening was produced with 160,000V discharges, and a (very brave) member of the public demonstrated Faraday's cage by sitting inside a metal ball while these discharges happened around him. Again, we were free after this visit, so some of us went into town to find a restaurant to have some Bratwurst, which was simple but rather tasty. We spent the evening quietly back at The Tent.
After breakfast, the meeting broke-up as the participants made their own ways to whereever. I travelled back to Munich Airport with Roger EA3ALZ, where we had a quick lunch, before I had to fly back to Stansted.
Thanks to Klaus, DK4SK, the themetune for the meeting was the trailer for the porn film, 'Die mit dem roten Halsband' (NSFW). More seriously, big thanks to Ulf DK5TX and Christoph DK9TN for brilliant work organising the meeting, and to YASME and the BCC for their sponsorship.