Good news to start the weekend

This has started out to be a good weekend for several reasons….

FIRST REASON- OC TRANSPO STRIKE SETTLED…  It seems that both the union and the city were not too impressed with the idea of back to work leglisation.  It seems the Labour minister told them what would happen once the bill was passed and gave them the chance to settle now and save a few days or be ordered back…  Both sides chose to settle and say that they won rather than admitting defeat.  I however still stand behind my earlier posting that mentioned the fact that with President Obama coming for a visit in mid Feburary that it would of been maddening and frustrating for the Ottawa Residents to have to interrupt their travel plans more than usual to accomodate security concerns.  I also feel that Prime Minister Harper did not want to be embarrased by the World Media Outlets using the Transit Strike as background information.  For whatever reason the strike is over and now they are trying to get the vehicles back on the road ASAP…

2nd Reason VA3QV/m is back on the road-  Early in January (right after I returned to Ottawa after droping Trisha off in Gananoque my trusty pickup truck had an argument with a “more solid” snowbank than I thought it was.  The result was that the front wheels were not pointing exactly in the same direction.  The repairs were inexpensive but time consuming but now the famous VA3QV/m is back on the road.  After heading out for a test drive last night all that is needed is a wheel allignment in the near future but I will hold off on that until I can get some new tires which are now on my shopping list…  It was nice to drive home last night from the garage and although the last 3 weeks have been good on my health…  Its nicer to drive than to walk in the cold…

3rd Reason is that I am finding the time to play radio- Now not much was done on Friday evening on the radio but so far on the Saturday morning thing have just been great.  The morning started with a chat with Barry VE3ISX who is the Net Manager and who was also the NCS at that hour for the ONTARS Net on 3.755.  Barry had an excellent signal into Ottawa from his QTH in Hamilton Ontario.  Shortly after that a nice ragchew was held here in Ottawa locally with Don VA3GFD on the Ottawa Valley Mobile Radio Club’s  repeater VE3TWO.  We managed to tell tall tales untill just before 1000 hrs local when I switched over to the 40m band for the Pothole net…  VE3GX, VE3XRA, VE3WEH, VA3AE and myself had a nice roundtable session. 

Right after the net concluded I jumped back over to 80m and checked in with Norm VE3NLH who was the NCS for that hour of the ONTARS Net.  Norm lives in Northern Ontario and is usually not in my range during the day time on 80m.  We have had many chats in the past in the evenings on 3.730 and early mornings on ONTARS but daytime contacts are rare…

Like I said its been a good start to the weekend….

73bob

RAC Membership Follow up…

My goodness do they ever do things quickly….  When i got home late Thursday evening there was an email from Erika (my daughter) telling me that she had renewed my RAC Membership….  When I checked my membership status as RAC on Friday the database had already been changed to show the renewal…

The reason I am mentioning this is that if you remember some comments I made  earlier in the month about some issues I had with questions about my membership. 

Well as it turns out …  the issues were at my house and not their house and seeing that I was fairly quick to b!tch about things it seems fair to jump right back in just as quick and say some catch phraises such as “Good Job, Well done and oops….sorry”

The system does work and I should be reading the next issue of TCA when the Postal Person delivers it to my mailbox rather than when I could borrow a copy to read…

73bob

Looking for new toys

We are now approaching one of my favourite times of the year… 

“The Pre Dayton Sales”…

Very shortly amateurs will be looking at their old toys and deciding what they will be selling so they can get a bit of extra cash for the upcoming trip to the Dayton Hamfest in late May…

This means that as someone who is not going to Dayton (again) that I have started to save my allowance and paper route money so I might have a chance of getting someones old toys that they have grown tired of…

I have hopes of finding a Yaesu FT 847 for the house but they are pretty rare and never local to Ottawa when you find one.  Perhaps someone will have grown tired of their buddipole and I might find one used to use with my Yaesu FT 817 and my dual band handheld is getting tired so perhaps I might find a VX5 or VX7 at a good price is someone wants to upgrade to the VX8-r…

If I can’t find a good deal at least I will have some serious $$$ saved up in time for the local flea markets normally held after Dayton…  The Smith Falls ARC and the Iroquois ARC hold theirs earlier and then the Ottawa ARC has theirs on the Labour Day Weekend….  Not sure what new (to me) toys will be arriving but there will be some showing up for sure…

73bob

Slightly off topic but….

Warning:  This is a non amateur radio posting

But as its my blog, its my perogative every now and again to stray from what I concider to be the established norm….

News items in Ottawa today are two unrelated stories…

Item 1-  The Canadian Parliament is taking steps to leglislate the striking Public Transportation workers (OC Transpo workers) back to work.  My city (the city of Ottawa) has been without Bus and O Train service for over 50 days now due to a labour dispute between the union and the City of Ottawa…

Item 2-  US President Obama will be visiting the City of Ottawa on Feburary 19th….

Did I say unrelated????  Given the fact that Ottawa is already at a standstill due to the lack of public transit.   Commute times are already 5 times longer than usual due to traffic.  If you read my blog on a regular basis you might remember a posting where I mentioned it took me 3 hours just to make it to a doctors appointment as I could not get a Taxi….Times are tough in the big city…

Now lets look at how long it will take the city to get the busses back on the road once the leglisation is passed that forces the union back to work. 

For those of you who don’t know, there is a provincal law that determines time frames for manditory safety checks for commercial vehicles.  Working on the assumption that this would be spread out over the course of a year, this really means that 1/4 (25%) of the fleet will have to be saftied before they can legally carry passengers.  This will mean that the mechanics will be busting their humps just to get things up and running before the President of the United Stated comes for a visit…

Why does this have to be done before???? you might ask…

For those of you who are not long time Ottawa Residents I will enlighten you…  Every time we get visited by a foreign dignetary they tend to block traffic, close streets etc in the name of security.  This is normal for every dignetary….  Now if you take the heightened security that is necessary for the President of the United States of America, they will most likely be blocking bridges and closeing the route hours before.  This normally shuts down the city, but it you factor in the Transit Strike it would be a day that you might as well stay at home as nothing will be moving in the city….  And it we got the snow we got yesterday (just under 20 cm) it would be hopeless…

I am glad to see the Federal Goverment taking steps to get the busses back running in Ottawa… I am just sorry and ashamed that the reason they are doing it is to make us look good in the foreign press (we can’t have the CNN Bus stuck in traffic can we???) and not to help the citizens of the City of Ottawa.

We now end our unscheduled commentary and return you to our regulary scheduled blog…

73bob

Local vhf SSB work

Its been a long time since I found the time to be in shack on a Tuesday evening at 2100 EASTERN.

Every Tuesday night at 2100 is the West Carleton ARC VHF/UHF/6m and above SSB Net.  Now to be honest this is not really the name of the net but it does get the point across.  The net starts with a bit of  a roundtable on 144.250 usb and after the roundtable and announcements a roll call is conducted on 50.150 and 432.150.  If there is any requests for the other bands they will then head over to 220mhz, 902 mhz and 1.2 mhz for testing purposes. 

At this time I run only 70cm, 2m and 6m but hopefully some time in the future…  who knows…

If you have the time and think you are within range of Ottawa then give it a listen or try to join in…  Definately worth it…

73bob

ISS Followup

Well it seemed to go great from all I have read from the various sources.  There was an email sent out after saying how well things went….  I think the best report of this would be from VA3STL’s Blog  as his wife attended the event as his children were in the audience. 

73bob

Speaking of the ISS

Seem strange on how some of these things just fit together.  Just this weekend I had discovered the ISS (yes I knew it was there before but finally got around to listening for it) and then this email comes my way…

The International Space Station will pass over Ottawa tomorrow Tuesday 27 January at 1433 hrs EST (that’s 2:33 pm local time).

We will attempt to contact the ISS via radio.  This will be done from the Castor Valley Public School in the Osgoode/Metcalfe area.  There will be a school assembly in the gym and 12 students have been picked to ask questions to the astronauts.

We were at the school today setting up radios in the gym and the tracking antenna on the school roof.  We only

have 10 minutes of contact before the space station vanishes out over the Atlantic . 

 Anyway, please listen in.  The frequency will be 145.800 MHz in the FM mode on the 2 Metre band. 

Please let us know if you hear the contact and where you heard it from. 

 The school board notified the local media so it may/may not be on the local news tomorrow night. 

Steve Regan VA3MGY in Ottawa

Anyway Steve and the group will be doing their  best to both give the students something to talk about and to think about and both will be done with the help of AMATEUR RADIO and with a little bit of luck they might even think about AMATEUR RADIO after…

Good luck to the students and well done to the dedicated group of amateurs…

73bob

 

 

A 6m opening and the Intenational Space Station

Wow…. what an interesting evening for a SWL (Short Wave Listener).  At least that what I was delegated to this evening but was it ever interesting…

While spinning the dial in the 6m band I noticed there was a heck of an opening heading down into W4 Land.  I listened on an off for about an hour as a few stations seemed to be racking up the contacts…  I tried 100w with the long wire and even if the tuner said it was a good match I had no luck but it was interesting hearing the magic band in action again.  One of these days I must get my vhf/uhf and 6m beams back up in the air and try and work some of these stations…

After the opening was getting a bit stale I decided to surf the internet and found out that the cross band repeater on the ISS is now active when its not being used for regular amateur use.  The RX is 145.800 and the TX is 437.800 and both modes are FM. 

While looking this up I also noticed that the ISS would be overhead very soon so I quickly disconnected the FT7800 and connected my dual band J Pole to the FT 897 and programmed in the frequencies.  Just in time…  I heard VE4′s and VE3′s along with W2′s and W1′s.

It was interesting to hear them all out there and perhaps I should finally take a look at this part of the hobby.  I was trying to buy recently an Yaesu FT847 which is  primarly a Sat Rig with the built in Doppler Shift but so far no luck…  But I did find it exciting to at least listen to the activities and seeing how bad HF is…  perhaps this is the time to start looking a bit more seriously at that part of the hobby….

73bob

All the other Saturday Stuff

The morning started great with a large cuppa coffee and then a trip into the shack.  I managed to have a QSO with Alan VA3STL, Mike VA3MPM and Larry VE3WEH on the local repeater VE3TWO (147.300 +).    Mike is the president of the Manotick Amateur Radio Group and they are looking at some upcoming portable ops and he invited me to join them.  Once the snow melts I would be really interested…

After that I switched over to 40m for the Ottawa Valley Mobile Radio Club Pothole Net and had a great roundtable chat with Mark VA3UMP, Roger VE3NPO, ED VE3GX, Ernie VE3EHH, Larry VE3WEH, Graham VA3OFD and VE3XRA Glenn.

Once the net had concluded I then grabbed a bit of breakfast and the headed over to the park for the Winter Field Day attempts.  From reading my previous entry you know how that turned out…After thawing out myself and the equipment I then made one quick hf contact to a station in the Winter Field day (Check out Survivorham16 on the Youtube site) and then after that grabbed lunch…

Back in the shack I managed a quick QSO with the OVMRC Webmaster Chris VE3CUZ.  If you have a chance visit the website at WWW.OVMRC.ON.CA because I think Chris has done a fantastic job re working the site…Congrats

Thats my day so far….Howz your day going?

73bob

When in Doubt…. Read The F$%$$% Manual

Now seeing that I had taken the time to get the equipment all set up for the Winter Field Day and I had taken the time to get myself all dressed up nice and warm for the Winter Field Day you think that I might of remembered to check the manual for the radio to see how much cold the radio can take…

If I had I would of seen the following:

 

Operating Temp. Range : -10 C to +60 C(+14 F to +140 F)

 

 

 

 

 

This lets me know that I was operating approximately 15 degrees Celcius below what Yaesu recommends for operating temps.  It was close to -25 deg Celicus in Hutton Park today…

That could explain why the transmit gave out and the receive gave out and to be honest nothing worked…

So in reality I got dressed up in my warmest togs and walked for 15 minutes to get to the park, to set up a 20m vertical delta loop (which seemed to work) just to be able to freeze up  my radio and then take down all the equipment and then walk back….

And to add insult to injury the two videos I recorded at the park to show you how everything was set up did not turn out.  I guess the camera has a minimum operating temp as well…  The first vid taken just as was leaving my QTH turned out and the video taken once I had unpacked everything at home turned out just the two taken at the park did not work….

Murphy wins this round!

73bob