During tonight’s exercise, the team’s entire compliment of radio equipment was audited in an attempt to find problems with the kit, most of which is now 8 years old.

A large part of this testing, aside from the usual faulty displays on radios and poor battery performance, was the testing of the transmit function on the radios along with the effeciency of the radio antennas (whether that be handheld radio antennas or vehicle antennas).

This functionality can only really be accuirately tested with an Power & SWR meter, and the loan of such a meter which was arranged by team member Mark Parry from a friend, Steve Garwell, and Steve kindly allowed Mark to borrow one for the evening…. or so we thought!

What actually came to pass was that instead of us borrowing the equipment for the evening, Steve Garwell decided to very kindly donate an Avair AV-600 meter to the team.

This meter, which allows us to evaluate the performance of our radios and antenna, will prove very useful in quickly identifying any issues with our fleet of approximately 80 radios and antennae in the future.

Huge thanks to Steve Garwell for very kindly donating this equipment to the Bolton MRT and making the relevant Equipment Officer’s role (that’s Fletcher) just a little bit easier!