The Madmen of Colorado

This Sunday sees the annual "Colorado 14er" event.  This is a unique ham radio event were sane men and women hike up 14,000' peaks in order to operate their ham radios.............don't ya wish we had a few here in Eastern Ontario?!?!?!?!?! (Yes Bob, I'd carry your oxygen bottle for you!)

The goal of this event is to see how many of the mountaintop stations you can contact. The prime operating hours are from 1500 to 1800 UTC.

Last year I took part in the event as VE3FCT and had a blast, but the highlight for me was to be one of the 104 contacts made by KB0SA - Boy Scout Troop 6 from Monument, Colorado from the summit of Pikes Peak. 

What is really great about this bunch of Scouts is that everyone of them has a ham ticket, as do their leaders. 

Troop 6 will be back up in the 14,000' peaks this coming Sunday for the 2012 Colorado 14er event and I hope to make contact with them again.  It's always good to support the kids in this hobby of ours.

The website is HERE, and the suggested frequency list HERE.  This year for the first time they have agreed to combine the event with the SOTA program to encourage participation in it.

Hope to hear you all on the bands this Sunday encouraging these guys.





Islands on the Air

This weekend is the annual IOTA weekend.  Lots of great DX should be on the air for this, including CY9M from St. Paul Island...look for them on 14.185. 

The contest runs from 1200Z July 28th to 1200Z July 29th.  The rules can be found HERE.

As I can't operate from my shack this weekend I'm going to have to find somewhere local to operate portable from, and someone to come along and give me a hand.  It's going to be very nice just to have nothing to think about and to be able to just play radio.

Fort Henry Hill is no longer an option thanks to the new visitors interpretation centre recently built on the east side of the parking lot.  The new centre is equipped with 25 or so plasma information screens being used entertain the visitors and the noise floor has duly risen from S0 to S8 and S9.

Antenna of choice will be my MFJ-1910 mast with a 31 foot radiator taped to it, and six 16 foot radials and two 31 foot radials.  This antenna works very well for collecting DX with a 4:1 Balun, and it's very light weight and easy to put up.  I have a drive on mast base for it.

Hopefully the SFI Gods, and the weather Gods, will be shining on us.

IARU - - - the aftermath

Things did not go the way I wanted them to....but when do they ever?  Selling our house, and looking for a new one got in the way of going to Hay Bay and using the high antennas.  Oh well, "She who must be obeyed" is happy at least.

So instead I stayed at home and operated in bits and pieces, closing down, and leaving the house, when we had a showing. 

On top of this I did another couple of goofs, the first one was my AF Gain was turned down and secondly I spent half of my operating time at 10w because I didn't check my power setting.  Obviously there's still more to learn with this radio.

The antennas used at home were a 40m off center fed dipole at about 30 feet, and a homebrew 31 foot vertical with 10 radials spread out on the grass.  Both antennas worked perfectly and I had great results with them.  A total of 120 contacts were made:

66 SSB on 20m
40 SSB on 10m
14 SSB on 40m

Contacts where made with stations in Europe, South America, North America, Africa, and the Middle East.

The bands were up and down with some very deep QSB at times, and the SFI, A, and K indexes were nothing to write home about either.....in fact this morning they're bloody awful:

SFI = 148
A index = 17
K index = 6
SN = 120

It was 30C here in Kingston yesterday with "a lot" of humidity, seems to be cooler today though.

All in all I'm happy with my score, considering I was only a part-time operator.

We'll see what happens next weekend for the VHF Contest.

IARU HF Contest

This coming weekend will see the 2012 IARU HF World Championships take place.  Should be a great weekend out at Hay Bay.....if the bands cooperate!

This contest is designed to have hams contact as many other amateurs, especially IARU member society HQ stations, around the world as possible using the 160, 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meter bands.

Timings for the contest is beginning 1200 UTC Saturday and ending 1200 UTC Sunday.

In the past few years it has been possible to work all of Europe in a few hours of the contest start time, so hopefully this year will be outstanding.

Radio being used will be the FT-950 into a 160m Off Center Fed Dipole up at 100 feet.   There will also be a 31 foot ground mounted vertical with multiple ground radials laid out. 

Here's hoping for a good weekend!

Busy July.......

It's looking like it will be a busy summer for portable operating this year, I'm hoping the weather is going to cooperate! 

'Tis the season to be outside playing radio, not cooped up indoors in the shack.  Try some antenna experiments, find a hilltop to work from, activate an island, activate a lighthouse.....there's always something to do when the weather is good....and some of us "nutcases" even do this in the winter!

So far there does not seem to be a free weekend in July!  So far we have:
July 1st - Canada Day Contest
July 8th - Iroquois Island Activation (ON271)
July 14/15th - IARU HF World Championships
July 21/22nd - CQ WW VHF Contest
July 22nd - 4 Mile point Light Activation (CAN823)
July 28/29th - RSGB IOTA Contest

Tucked in with all those dates is July 4th which just happens to be my 25th wedding anniversary.  How she puts up with me is one of lifes big mysteries!! Anyway......we'll see if I'm still alive at the end of the month!

The Field Day Report - 2012

What a superb weekend!!  Don-VE3MNE, Tim-VA3TIC and myself drove out to Hay Bay, about 45 kms west of Kingston, around noon on Thursday. We were joined by Richard-VA3VDP late Friday, and Derek-VE3HRW on Saturday.  We were operating at the cottage of VE3MNE, and a beautiful location it is.

The view from the 20m station

The weather was fantastic.  Lots of sunshine and blue skies for most of the weekend.  We did get a small amount of rain and some heavy wind on Thursday evening, but it didn't last long and the Hay Bay Amateur Radio Club was soon back at it laying out coax and preparing the antennas.

On Friday we sorted through our miles of coax fixing connectors as required, giving our notch filters some much needed maintainance and sorting out the operating positions.  As per our well established field day tradition, we went out for a steak dinner at the Wellington Grill in Prince Edward County and really had a good time. 


While at the Grill we all gave a farewell toast to our good friend John Snasdell-Taylor VA3GST, who sadly became a silent key a few days previously.  John, who was an engineer on the design and development team for the Canadarm, the space shuttle remote manipulator system, was an absolute gentleman.  He'll be missed by us all very much. 

By early Saturday morning we had seven antennas in the air, two 80m and one 160m off-center fed dipoles (two of which are up at 100 feet), a 20m Delta loop at about 50 feet off the ground, three 31 foot verticals with multiple radials, and a vintage WW2 No. 19 radio set 32 foot antenna for use on 40m and 15m.....and by 1130 we were pacing up and down awaiting the start time!

80m and 160m didn't provide us with much business and those bands had extremely high noise levels, but we still managed over 150 contacts on them.  The 40m band was a complete zoo with stations on top of stations all calling "CQ Field Day!!!".  I have to admit that it took a while for my ears to get used to the over abundance of signals and to be able to sort them out in my head.

After a few hours we had to do an antenna change for the 20m station.  The 20m Delta Loop wasn't working as efficient as it should have been.  With seven antennas in the air it was an easy job to switch things around without disturbing too many operators.

15m came, went and came back again.  When the band was working it was hot, and we managed to get most of the western US and Canada on it.  We even had a station from Northern Serbia answer our CQ.


VA3VDP

Richard-VA3VPD, the newest member of the Hay Bay Amateur Radio Club, operated our digital and CW station.  This was his very first field day, and what a superb job he did.   Richard operated on all bands and had the use of two antennas, a 80m OCF dipole and a 31 foot vertical, and he used both of them to his advantage.

All too soon Field Day was over and the bands magically went silent....well, the Sunday hemorrhoid nets were still in full swing complaining about the damn contesters, and the hillbilly nets from the deep south were swopping moonshine recipes, complete with their usual colourful language, but apart from them the other 35,000 hams went quiet.

The lack of contacts from Florida was very noticeable this year.  It wasn't until we got home and saw the news about the the bad weather they are having that we realized that they had other things on their minds than taking part in field day over the weekend.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to them all and we hope they and their families are safe and dry.

As a final thought the Hay Bay ARC would just like to point out to a couple of dozen hams that there is no prize, or certificate, for the station who can say their callsign the fastest and that we are sorry we could not understand your callsign well enough to establish contact.  Perhaps next year you could slow down?

It was a fantastic weekend, and as Don VE3MNE said as we left - "363 days to go till we do it all over again next year!".

Congratulations!!

I received the following email in my inbox this morning from the Prince Edward County Radio Club: 

New Ham - Aaron Wiik - VE3UDA - 10 years old!!
Posted by: Mike Papper ve3vmp
Date: Wed Jun 13, 2012 12:10 am ((EST))

I am pleased, honoured and excited to announce that Aaron Wiik VE3UDA,
10 years old, has passed the Basic Amateur Radio exam with a score of 74%.

Both Aaron VE3UDA and his dad Peter VA3ORU (passed with honours) were students of our Fall 2011 course. They live in Cherry Valley. So please welcome our new Hams to the Magic of Radio when you hear them on the air in the coming months.

Congratulations to Aaron-VE3UDA, and well done!!

RLCT 2012 - The Wrap Up

This past weekend saw the 41st annual Rideau Lakes Cycle Tour run between Ottawa and Kingston......and a great time was had by one and all.

For the seventh year running the Frontenac EmComm Group (FECG) provided the communications for the southern part of the route, between Perth Road Village and Kingston.  Ottawa ARES looks after Carleton University to Black's Corner's, and Lanark-North Leeds ARES looks after the middle section.  This year, all three groups, had over 40 operators working over the weekend.

Don-VE3MNE running the net
from his "command post"

FECG looked after the radio check points at Perth Road Village, Loughborough Lake, Inverary, Glenburnie, McAdoo's Lane, and Queen's University.  Both myself and Don-VE3MNE manned the Perth Road Village radio check point.  We ran net control for the southern portion on the VE3FRG repeater, and a liaison station with Westport net control on the Christie Lake repeater.

Establishing comms was pretty easy this year using the VE3FRG repeater, none of the stations required a lot of power to reach it.  VE3FRG has a huge footprint and we used an awful lot of it.

However, trying to hit the Christie Lake or Lavant repeaters was another matter.   It seems my Ringo Ranger has an issue, and as a result has an SWR of 4.1:1 and was pretty much unusable.  So, using typical ham ingenuity, we put up a 5/8 mag-mount, but we had to mount it on a cast iron frying pan for a ground plane as it was the only item we had that the magnet would stick to.  We then put the frying pan on top of the village sign to get enough height to reach the Christie Lake repeater.......and I've no idea why Don carries a frying pan in his truck!!

Riders at Perth Road Store

We arrived on scene at 1030L, and the first rider went through our location at 1140L - flying faster than Bob-VA3QV's electric Vesper!!   Everything was going smoothly until we were informed of a memorial service being held in the village church, just across the road from where we were set up.  I think they expected us to close up shop and disappear, but with 2200+ cyclists coming through the village there was nowhere else for us to go.  In the end we simply turned down the radios so they were not blaring away, and asked the riders to be quiet and slow down by the church, which they all did with the utmost of respect, and that calmed the situation. 

We ended up having some pretty heavy rain from about 1500L till 1630L.  The last rider blew through our location about 1730L and then we started the drive down to Queen's to play "tail-end Charlie" and pick up radio equipment there.

Sunday was a very early start for our portion of the event.  Out of bed at 0500L and on the road to Perth Road at 0525.  I past the first rider heading north at 0540L just past Hwy 401.  The fog on the Perth Road was very thick and visability was less than 50m at times.....kind of scary early in the morning with the deer out on the roads.

The weather was very hot and muggy, the Perth Road General Store was a hot spot for topping up on water and food for the long slog ahead.  The terrain around Perth Road is fairly hilly and the muggy weather must have made it pretty tough for some of the riders.

Lots of hams involved besides those manning the radio check points.  We had five or six mobile in various vehicles, doing pick-ups for riders who opted out, or the repair trucks.  It was nice to see the amateur community come together and doing some worthwhile community service.

For a look at how things played out from the Ottawa end, have a look at my old friend Bob's page - HERE. 

'Twas a great weekend all-in-all, looking forward to next year, especially with the proposed changes.