Last night I took up Glenn VE3XRA’s offer of a ride to the monthly West Carleton Amateur Radio Club Meeting which is held in the Kanata District of Ottawa.
Given the disance/travelling time from my QTH to the meeting location I never seem to make it to their meetings. If I was to attend their meetings I would get home close to midnight…
But back to the meeting…. Its refreshing to see that a Radio Club actually remembers to operate after Field Day… The WCARC goes for the full year and does not suspend meeting for the summer months… This is something I have always wondered about… In the summer months we have amateurs from all over visiting the Capital (Ottawa) City on their holidays and the local Amateur Community seems to take the same holidays… The club nets are shut down and the repeaters are barren unless you have a sked with a friend who is lucky enough to have a camper trailer or cottage within repeater range of Ottawa…
So the WCARC is a full time club… Yes the attendance does suffer in the summertime but as the executive cares enough to show up and a few of the members do as well then visitors are welcome and will be enlightened by the guest speaker and will be enjoying an informative evening.
As it turned out the Guest Speaker was also the club president. Al VO1NO/ve3 gave us an excellent powerpoint presentation on the WCARC DXPediton to Grafton Ontario for the June ARRL VHF Contest. Every year (the last 5 years at least) the club packs up a 2m/222/6m/ 902/1.2/and a bunch of higher up stations and sets up a super DXing VHF station. Take a look through the ARRL contests reports for VE3WCC (club call) and if you follow this link you will go to the club’s presentation page and see different pictures and write ups from past VHF DXPeditions.
I believe that once the scores are tallied for this year we should find that VE3WCC will be number one in Canada and fairly respectable for the rest of the contest competators…
It was a fun evening… The talk was interesting and I hope to make it there again…
73bob
Tags: amateur radio, Amateur Radio Club, ARRL June VHF Contest, West Carleton Amateur Radio Club
