Its now Monday morning and things are starting to get back to normal after the “holidays”…
The day started this am with a “Dads Taxi” trip from home to Carleton University where Erika needed to be to sign some OSAP Papers and then for a 12noon class.
The OC TRANSPO union will be having a forced vote on Thursday and if the membership goes against the unions suggestion and accepts the Citys offer we might get our busses back on the road in about 10 days or so. Now this has nothing to do with radio but the strike has caused me to have to change many plans so I can get family members back and forth between school, work and various appointments and it is sure hard to sympathise with those who are on strike who were making more than I made before the strike and will be making more than I ever made after the strike. Although I do grant them the right to strike, taking their actions in December which adversely affected those who take public transport at a very difficult and cold time of the year has not helped their public image whatsoever and not really garnered the union any public support…
I for one am starting to get fed up with the heavier traffic, the Dads Taxi Runs and the lack of parking spots anywhere in the city… If they don’t come back soon…they can stay out till ….
Anyway lets get back to radio after my mini-rant…
As you know I took Trisha to Gananoque this Saturday and the radio work was not the best… I made only two contacst on 40m (VE3GX in Ottawa via groundwave and VE9HC in Hartland NB) and one contact on the Kingston Repeater and two contacts on the Smith Falls Repeater. The trip itself kind of had me wondering why I bothered to even hook up the antennas for the trip…
Sunday was slightly better with me joining the North Bay Net on 3.768 at 0900 which took me into the Pothole Net on 3.760 here in Ottawa at 1000 hrs. I was hoping to hear the Ontario Swap Shop on 40m at noon but there were only digital sounds on 7.055 with some CW as well so I’m guessing that the Swap Shop was pushed off the air due to longer than usual band conditions…
Around 1400 Hrs I was able to check into the Trans Canada Net on 14.140 with VE7TA as the NCS. This proved that the antenna changes done earlier in the week worked but there is still some work to go yet…
I took some time off to do the shopping thing with Liz and then came back into the shack around 1800 and was able to check into the sandbox net and although I did not write down his call he was located outside Boston Mass, which once again proves that the bands are going longer… earlier in the evenings still…
I came up to 3.755 in anticipation of the 80m version of the Ontario Swap Net but just as the net started the band started to go even longer and all was lost to me atleast…
I can’t help but to feel sorry for those new hams who have heard us talking about how good the band conditions used to be… We were even talking about how things would be changing for the better by now… It ain’t happened yet… I hope we have not lost any bodies to various other interests as they wait for the sunspot cycle that seems to elude us…
I have scouted out a potential site for my CF3RCS participation in the FYBO and will be testing it out this Saturday (or Sunday or both days)for an hour or so… More info on this later in the week but I hope to set up the 817/tuner combo on the tailgate of the truck and string out the doublet between two friendly trees and check out the noise level… You can’t even start to guess about propagation so just seeing how good or bad the noise floor is will have to do…
Enjoy the week and more updates later
73bob
Due to random chance that someone decided to apply for a special prefix for the VA/VE calls for the first two months of 2009, I have decided to do some local DXPeditions using the special event prefix in conjunction with my VA3RCS Call to become CF3RCS.
