The Bromley and District Amateur Radio Society

Radio stars in unusual rescue
by RSGB

Coastguard and Raynet members Keith Morgan, MW3LFL, Dave Mansell, GW8SFT, and Iwan Davies, MW3ROX, recently took part in an unusual “rescue”. Following a crime in Ceredigion, Wales , a heavy safe was dumped down an old mineshaft near Goginan, a few miles to the east of Aberystwyth. The police wanted to recover the safe for fingerprint evidence and the Coastguard was called in to retrieve it.

The Coastguard team knew that communications would be difficult down a mineshaft and normal Marine VHF would probably not work. However, as radio amateurs, they were able to come up with alternative communication solutions.

Their first idea was to use the UHF amateur band on 433.050MHz with Keith operating as comms link at the top of the shaft while Iwan was lowered into the shaft. This worked well initially but the signal became noisy and barely readable when Iwan neared the bottom of the shaft.

However, the team had already taken this into account and provided a back-up communication method by lowering a long length of RG58 cable down the shaft, The bottom end of the cable was connected to a small helical aerial while the top was fitted to a handheld transceiver. This set-up allowed them to communicate on VHF and gave solid copy. The safe was duly winched to the surface and handed over to the waiting detectives.