Prof, best of luck if you want to call ATC first. Today I was listening out to Essex Radar for a while and heard the following:
A glider (from Wethersfield, I believe): Essex, Glider XXX
ATC: Glider XXX, stand by:
[Time passed. ATC talked to various airliners or whatever for several minutes]
Glider: Essex, Glider XXX standing by;
ATC: Glider XXX, I'll get back to you;
[Time passed. ATC talked to various airliners or whatever for several more minutes]
ATC: Glider XXX, pass your message;
Glider: [Unintelligible];
ATC: Glider XXX, I received only carrier wave, say again;
Glider: [Unintelligible];
ATC: Glider XXX, I received only carrier wave, stay out of controlled airspace.
I changed to 130.4 soon after, so I heard no more - I was going cloud flying between Stansted and Bury St. Edmunds, to get high enough to cross to Tibenham without descending into the Mildenhall/Lakenheath complex or needing to thermal near the extended centreline of any of their runways.
You asked which ATC to talk to. You could consider Essex, Lakenheath, or I suppose London Info. None will know all the others' traffic, I expect, none will know of other gliders, and if you try Essex they will almost certainly be too busy. Lakenheath was fairly busy today too (I listened out to them for a while when near their area). If you do try ATC, make sure you have a good radio and well-charged battery - I can't imagine it improves our credibility with them if we can't sustain transmissions like the chap today.
If you do cloud fly,. for goodness sake use 130.4 while doing it - as I have pointed out before, the biggest risk to a glider is another glider - and it might be me in that area!
I can't convince the power pilots on here (and I'm not going to try any more) that talking to ATC is impractical and anyway addresses the least of our risks. If you monitor Essex or Lakenheath for a bit, however, you will understand why I wrote earlier that if all gliders in East Anglia did so, they would be swamped.
By the way, the only powered aircraft I saw were in VMC, well below cloud. The closest was a few hundred metres away, at my height - about 1500 feet, just south of Ridgewell, and it looked like he had just flown over Ridgewell - where we were winch launching, and displaying the correct signal for what its worth. And they think we take risks!
Regards - Chris N.
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