We’ll be holding our AGM at 7.30 pm on Monday 5th February, 2018 in the G8BBC radio shack in Broadcasting House.

The new G8BBC shack, in “Arthur Askey’s flat” at the top of the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London, has just been opened by BBC Director General Lord Tony Hall.

After cutting the ribbon at the door to the new radio room housing the club station, Lord Hall passed a greetings message over the air on the 40 metre band to another heritage station, GB2RN on board the Imperial War Museum ship HMS Belfast in the Pool of London.  Volunteer radio operator Jorgen Faxholm, M0AXP, was on board to acknowledge the DG’s message, and sent congratulations to the reactivated BBC station.

After the transmission, the Director General was presented with honorary
membership of the London BBC Radio Group, bringing numbers up to 36.
The event was well attended, with TV programme “TX Factor” and radio
podcast “ICQ” recording the opening for future broadcast. Representatives from
Practical Wireless and the RSGB were also present.

See and hear media coverage of the radio shack opening:

• A video story on the opening in TX Factor Episode 19 starting at 23:00
• A special video from the opening from the ICQ Podcast
• BBC Radio’s ‘Click!’ programme, listen from 19 mins

Full photos from the opening in this Flickr album by member Graham White.

We have access to the room that is now our radio club premises – a small room tucked in the roof of Broadcasting House affectionately known as “Askey’s Flat”. Work is underway to furnish and cable the area, and you may hear test transmissions at various times when one of our licensed operators has a few minutes spare.

The BBC’s Director General, Tony Hall, has agreed to officially open the new radio club on October 18th, 2017. There will be a small ceremony and plenty of sandwiches! He will make a short speech which we will broadcast live, and it will appear on the website soon after.

This is a new group of radio amateurs and SWLs at the BBC, which has an amateur radio heritage dating back to 1949. We are an independent group, hosted by BBC Engineering, and are in the process of installing our new shack, and rigging antennas on the roof of Broadcasting House, London.

We have 15 members at present, some of whom you will have seen or heard on BBC TV and Radio, or who are working behind the scenes in various programme and engineering departments. We have a wide range of membership categories covering permanent, freelance, and retired staff. Guest/associate memberships are considered.

We plan to be on the air by spring of 2017 on HF bands 40m to 10m, and VHF 2m.

On 24th March we carried out the RF survey on the roof of BH to reassure BBC Engineering that we will not cause them any QRM. This picture shows Jon M5AEO with BBC Engineer Mike Parkins making test transmissions on 144Mhz FM: