All the way from BY land (China) Neil King, VA7DX , sent me an email and asked "are we going to do a joint RAC Winter contest like we did last year"? He was, of course, referring to the RAC winter contest that SEPARS, SARC and Coquitlam participated in last year using the Olympic call VG7W.
I sent Neil's email to John Brodie and asked "what do you think?". He replied "let's go for it"! OK says I let's give it our best shot and involve both SARC and SEPARS from the south side of the Fraser.
We contacted Ian Procyk and Matt Dodge at the Coquitlam club and they already had the wheels in motion from their end so we started to make plans to move both the big yellow tower and the super tower over to Coquitlam. It was decided that we would use the SARC TH7 on the yellow tower and the Coquitlam club's X7 on the super tower.
John Brodie and I moved the two towers over to Coquitlam on Thursday December 9th, in the
rain of course, we assembled the TH7 and mounted it on the yellow tower. Prior to working on
the yellow tower we levelled the super tower and attempted to raise the tower from horizontal to
vertical only to discover that we had a hydraulic problem. After a visit by John Brodie and Don
Hamilton it was decided that the hydraulic oil was contaminated and required changing. On
Wednesday December 15th John Brodie, Kelvin Hall and I went to Coquitlam and changed the
oil in the hydraulic system and bingo it worked well for a while then the action slowed again
most likely from the contaminated oil we could not clear from the system. We got the tower into
the vertical position with the X7 mounted and now we were ready to go. These antennas were
going to be operated at legal limit so we had to get good SWR readings and we did.
While we were preparing the towers and antennas Ian and Matt were getting the radio, computers
and amps ready as well all this preparation required long hours but at the start of the contest all
was in good working order.
At 3:30pm on Friday December 17th we raised the X7 to 85 feet, the TH 7 to about 60 feet,
installed the IC 7600 we had borrowed from ICOM and we were now ready to start calling CQ at
4:00pm (0000Z).
Operators on site for the start of the contest were Marcy, VE7JT, Matt, VE7DUI and myself
Fred, VE7IO. We got off to a great start with two stations on SSB and one on CW and we were
soon joined by Anton, VE7SSD and Chris, VA7CMZ. Anton took over 160 SSB and had a
steady run. Later in the evening Al, VE7WJ joined the operators on 80 and we proceeded to go
through the night. By 6:00am Al, VE7WJ was whipping up his special Eggnog pancakes and
strong coffee, we were doing well but the bands were changing as the sun came up in the east.
Ian, VE7HHS took over on 80 and also ran a good rate. Through the morning we worked 80, 40
and 20 racking up the points with 20 CW wide open. Later in the morning 15 SSB became very
active and Matt was running better than 2 a minute for some time. Al, VE7WJ had been
pounding 80 all night and he was also running a very good rate of two plus per minute. Bill,
VE7XS joined us early in the morning and immediately began running a good rate on 20 SSB,
80 slowed and 15 continued to be hot. The 80 meter radio was switched to 40 SSB and Al got
things going again.
Around noon John, VA7XB and Brian, VE7WEB joined Marcy, VE7JT, Bill, VE7XS, Neil,
VA7DX, Ian, VE7HHS, Al, VE7WJ and Matt, VE7DUI to take over operating the three stations.
And, the bands opened up and rates climbed all through the afternoon resulting in a final score of
over 714,000 points. During the afternoon the ops concentrated on mults running 11
Provinces/Territories on several bands. A high QSO and mult count produced the large score.
We will have to wait until the final results are published however second place in Canada is not
out of reach.
There were many members of SARC, SEPARS and Coquitlam ARC that joined forces to make
the weekend experience one to remember. Thanks to the following for making our contest a
success:
Icom Canada for the loan of an IC7600
The Surrey Amateur Radio Club for the use of their two mobile towers and TH 7
The Coquitlam ARC for the use of their well equipped station and antennas
The members of SARC, Coquitlam and SEPARS who made time to get the station put together
and provide the ops.
I believe I speak for everyone who participated when I say we had a great time and I hope we
can do this again next year.
Fred VE7IO
