Spring Plans.....

Well it's time to start planning another radio adventure!!!   In the planning stage is a trip out to the west coast following basically the same route as my last trip out in 2014.  That is, crossing the prairies using the Red Coat Trail.

It's a 1,300-Kiolometre (810 Mile) route that approximates the path taken in 1874 by the North-West Mounted Police across southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, in their quest to bring law and order to the Canadian West.

It's a very scenic and relaxing route that I think is far superior than the Trans-Canada Highway....mainly because of the lack of big trucks and the slow speeds on this route.  No rushing here.

Due to the early time of year I'm planning on travelling, none of the provincial parks or commercial campgrounds are open.  So, I have been having fun trying to find places to Boondock at along the way....not very easy let me tell you !!  Hopefully the RCMP know the difference between "Resting" and "Camping".

I'll be taking my portable HF radio gear with me, both QRO and QRP variants, and I'm looking forward to making some great contacts along the way, as well as some SOTA activations out in BC.....I'm also planning on setting up at a beach campsite, probably Jordon River on Vancouver Island, for a few days and working as much South Asian DX as I can get.   On the actual trip, both ways, I will be operating at night and handing out some very rare grid squares for those taking part in this years ARRL International Grid Chase.

Stay tuned for more details!!

Winter Field Day Wrap Up...

Overall it wasn't a bad weekend....it was just that the propagation Gods never came out to play.   At 1330 UTC on Saturday, the propagation numbers were:   SFI = 69, SN = 0, A Index = 8, and the K Index = 2.

What the numbers didn't tell us about was the very deep QSB and the extreme noise levels on the bands.  I had a constant S8+ on 40m all weekend for example.

It was extremely frustrating hearing the typical morning American "hemorrhoid nets" on 40m coming in at S9 +30db, while most of the stations calling CQ WFD where way below the noise floor, very hard to pull out, and all dealing with massive QSB.

My antenna for the weekend was a 31' vertical with two 31' elevated radials, and two 16' elevated radials, all into a 4:1 Balun.   This was mounted on the back deck of the cottage we where at.  On the Friday evening before the event kicked off I did manage to work an Italian - IK2BCP, and two Belgium stations,  OP2A and OP4U...all of whom had lovely signals.....then it all went to hell  for the Field Day.

Saturday morning started off poorly as I couldn't get the antenna to tune up very well...it was taking ages for the ATU to work and sort out the SWR.   It turned out that the collapsible mast had in fact collapsed overnight in the wind and I was working with a compromised antenna.  It took five minutes to fix that issue and we were back on the air.

It was very interesting to listen to the difference of WFD this year compared to WFD nine years ago. This year a good number of stations had large pileups, nine years ago you where lucky to hear anyone calling CQ WFD.

One thing that did get my blood boiling over was a W9 station calling for relays as he couldn't get the information off of some stations trying to work him.  Relays??  In a contest ?? Really ?? Hmmmm !!!

I heard very few Canadian stations on this weekend, it could have just been the conditions, as the event was well advertised.

So, a good weekend.....lots of good food, friends and a decent bottle of Scotch.  Thanks to Dennis VA3DOY for coming out and paying us a visit, and finding us a supper venue on Friday evening.  Who knew "uptown metropolitan Westport" was so up market ??

Thanks go out to the many stations who struggled to work us, as we struggled to work them.  See you back at it next year!!

VE3 SOTA Update...

There's another update on the VE3 SOTA Association just been posted on their Blog.  It's available to read HERE.

By the look of things it seems we are getting very close to the first VE3 Activation Day which is fantastic news.

Some amateurs in VE3 land have been working for about 10 years to bring SOTA to our province, and it's thanks to the current crop that they were able to persuade the SOTA Management Committee to drop the 150m prominence requirement down to 100m.  If we were restricted to the p150, just about every available summit would have been located in Ontario North, and completely off the beaten track.  In other words it would have taken just about a whole two week vacation to do a simple activation.