Balloon Launch is a go!

The Space ADS-B Receiver Experiment (SABRE) team will be launching a high altitude balloon about 0900L on Wednesday, March 21st at Wingham, Ontario to test the satellite payload.

The Royal Military College launch team is now in place at Wingham and no doubt pouring over tomorrows weather and winds aloft charts. 

I'm sure all will be fine and that Richard's balloon launch will be a great success. 

You can track the balloon on APRS.FI (click here) which will have the callsign VE3RMC-11, and the chase team will be beaconing as VA3VDP-9.  I'll post more details as I get them from launch control.

The Canadian Islands Award Program

Every summer for the past four years the ham radio group I belong to has activated several islands. Last summer was no different, we activated five of the Canadian Islands around the Kingston area over a two month period. According to what records we could find most of them had not been activated for several years, and a one had never been activated at all. This was done so we could take part in the Canadian Islands Award Program.

It was a lot of fun, the days were hot and sunny, but there always seemed to be a good breeze blowing of the St. Lawrence or Lake Ontario to keep us cool and the bugs down while we operated.  It's a great way to keep hone your portable operating skills.

What amazed us was the demand for these islands. On one remarkable Sunday afternoon we worked hundreds of stations calling us as we operated portable on Simcoe Island. In fact at one point we did 139 contacts in 58 minutes after some kind soul spotted us on the DX Cluster. It was a great afternoon.

This coming summer will be no different for us, we already have plans to activate three islands- Milton, Garden, and Iroquois Islands. Milton has never been activated before so we are expecting a good response to its activation.

The downside to all this is that the management of the Canadian Islands Award Program does not do a good job in promoting the activity. Last year we sent in five activation notices to the webmaster to be placed on their news page. Not one of our activation notices was ever dealt with, or posted on their website, and we have since heard from several fellow activators who have had a similar experience.

Now I did complain via email to the program manager and coordinator, and he kindly phoned me in return and we had a splendid chat about several issues. I understand that these guys are volunteers and that they do this in their spare time….Don't get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with this. But come on, if you’re going to run an award program at least keep your website up-to-date, and list upcoming activations so that the ham community can see what is going on.

It’s been nine months today since the website was last up-dated, and in fact one page, the “Activators & Chasers & Expeditions” hasn’t been up-dated since 25 April 2004!! It’s one hell of a way to run an award scheme, in fact it looks like the award scheme is actually dead from the way the website looks.

The Canadian Islands Award Program is something Canadian hams should be proud of, it showcases our outdoors in all its glory. 

The Americans have the US Islands Award Program as well. Here’s a link to their website...............quite a difference eh?

Balloon Launch - March 20th or 21st

The Royal Military College of Canada will be launching a high altitude balloon at 0900 local, on Tuesday, March 20th, or Wednesday, March 21st, depending on the weather and the winds aloft.

Major Richard Van Der Pryt, VA3VDP, hopes that the balloon will reach 109,000 feet before it bursts.  Two vans will be used to track the balloon after it has been launched from Wingham, Ontario.

The balloon is equipped with an APRS tracker, and will use the callsign: VE3RMC-11, and it's very nice to see the RMC callsign being used once again.

This launch is part of an experiment being done for Major Richard Van Der Pryt's Phd Thesis. 

Best of luck with it Richard, we'll all be watching !!

Just another weekend...........

The bands were certainly not in the best of shape over the weekend with large solar flares and CME's screaming towards us, but it was still a good weekend DXing......well, any weekend is good if you can spend it chasing DX!

The new FT-950 certainly helped, I'm amazed at the performance of this rig.  The ATU will not handle the mismatch, so I now have a MFJ-949E manual tuner in line with the rig so I can tune up my 40m OCF on 15m and 17m.  Works like a charm.

The hard thing to remember is to put the tuner back on "bypass" so the ATU can work once I have finished on 15m and 17m.  So far I haven't screwed up.

This weekend I managed to put 8 DX contacts, including another two new countries in the log.  This weekends catch was:

PJ7PT in Sint Maartin on 10m.
ZD7FT in Jamestown, St. Helena on 17m.

And on 15m I worked:

CO8LY in Santiago de Cuba.
F4DSD in St. Martin de Crau, France.
CT9/RC5A on Madeira Island.
HA5JI in Budapest, Hungary.
IZ5HPQ in Toscany, Italy, and
ER4DX in Otaci, Moldova.

I'm pretty confident that I'll do quite well during the CQ SSB DX Contest at the end of the month......hopefully the bands will improve before then.

ARRL DX SSB Contest 2012

Another great contest weekend is over, and the bands were in pretty good shape, but there was some pretty deep QSB at times.

I played at it for a few hours on Friday and Saturday nights, and most of the day on Sunday.  I managed to log over 200 contacts in 63 countries and put three new countries in the log.

Funniest incident?  How about a PA0 in the Netherlands asking a N5 station in Texas to "please speak English".   I thought the Texan was going to have a fit!

I actually heard VA3QV this weekend on 40m, but didn't get a chance to work Bob. 

For the most part behaviour on the bands was pretty good, but the LIDS were still out in force tuning up over active QSOs.  Do the guys who do that ever listen before they press tune?   I don't think they do.

Overall I'm extremely pleased with the new FT-950 and the way it performed over the weekend.  I've still got a few things to master and remember how to do....such as working split, but the filters really make a huge difference in the pile ups.

I'm looking forward to the CQ WW DX SSB Contest at the end of the month and giving the rig another good workout.