2017 has seen a flurry of activity already, with a complete 90 and 210 selling, together with a 160 envelope, four bottom ends and several fans. One of the bottom ends was from a vintage T&C 77, advertised in France by Martin Christidis which sold elsewhere in France within a couple of weeks…
New for February are the two complete 90s and an elderly 90 envelope which came up on our ‘Stop Press’ section on the website during January. The 42 envelope which appeared there briefly has found a home already. At Zebedee we have been tidying our barn and found a number of items which appear in the List for the first time – a big LBL fuel filter, an ancient ‘woggle pump’, a plywood platform which fits atop a balloon from a publicity stunt many years ago, a Garmin 195 GPS, a tank trolley and a non-dismantleable dolly trolley.
The 2017 ‘Icicle Refrozen’ meet saw better weather than the previous year, although still murky with low cloud a lot of the time. Around 20 balloons flew on Saturday (7th Jan) whilst visibility limited the action on Sunday to four inflations. The Donnington Grove Country Club is proving a good location for the meet with hotel, flying, set dinner & trade show all on one site. Needless to say two days before the meet and a few days after the weather was clear, calm & frosty – reminiscent of those Icicle Meets of the Eighties…
The next big challenge for ballooning in Europe is radios and the change to 8.33KHz frequency spacing. Whilst we have an idea as to what radios are compatible (nearly all those out there at present are not!), and a 20% discount scheme through the CAA and the planned introduction date of 1st Jan 2018, it is not clear to this Ed whether it will be applicable anywhere outside EASA-land, which will give an idea of how quickly all those trusty ICOM A2/A3s and the like will go in the skip…
Further, whoever came up with the concept I guess was a technical boffin rather than a pilot. The end result of this change will see a true frequency of say 118.0083 (7 digits), which for the sake of “convenience” when dialling it up becomes 118.010 (6 digits) – in that process accepting that you are dialling up an approximation rather than the true frequency.
So with still only just over 2000 possible frequencies to choose from why did we not go to ‘channel numbers’ – of only 4 digits?! Too easy!