EXTRA!
World Amateur Radio Day (WARD)
A few weeks ago a couple of us (Craig, VE3OP and I) realized that World Amateur Radio Day was coming up. We were wondering if it would be possible to re-light the RAC headquarters station VA3RHQ as a special project. Aside from a 2m rig with a mag mount on a cabinet, the station had been silent for years. Arrangements would have to be made, permission to put antennas up would have to be granted, and contingency plans formulated. The original plan was to use the old yagi on the tower, but there was no rotor controller. The “vintage” coax was in the ceiling a few hundred metres from the shack, since as Murphy insists, the office had moved over time from the one nearest the tower to the one farthest from it. Our worst case contingency plan would have us operating from a vehicle in the parking lot for 24 hours, or from a picnic table outside in April. Not enough fun to be had there.
Eventually we were granted permission to put antennas on the roof and run from the office over the 24 hours from 8 P.M. local Monday for 24 hours. There were two stipulations: Nothing could threaten the asphalt roof, and cables could not run where there was a risk of anyone tripping on them. Keeping cables off the floor was easy, since they could be clipped to the suspended ceiling rails. OP had a commercial antenna that was a highly loaded vertical dipole for 20-10m. Think of a five foot H turned sideways on 3 foot mast supported by a four legged “quadrapod”. I figured I could put something up for 40m. Avoiding anything that could possibly damage the roof was another matter.
Craig’s antenna was designed for either a hard surface, like a parking lot, or a soft surface, like a lawn. The “feet” were small enough that they could have dented the roof, especially with extra weight added to the base to keep it upright in the stiff winds we were expecting. The solution we ended up with was to put some crushed cardboard under the feet and the center mast.
I decided to use one of my 40m antennas deployed as an L, with the vertical section wrapped around a SOTA Beams telescoping mast. The mast was shorter than the 10m needed to accommodate a quarter wave on 40, but by adding a few feet of fishing rod on the top and letting a bit of wire flap in the breeze over that, all of the wire could be put in the sky. It was necessary to wrap the wire with a shallow pitch around the mast. The single horizontal radial was just laid out over the roof. The roof, while covered with asphalt was just above a steel ceiling, making for a great ground. To hold the whole thing in the sky, I made a tripod out of wood for the centre, and some aluminum L channel I had around from previous projects. To protect the roof, I used rubber stair tread material that I have used on my own roof for similar situations. All in all that part worked well. In the end, the antenna resonated at 7.2 MHz, which was great.
Overnight I banged away on 40m, trying to spend a half hour on CW followed by a half hour on SSB. It turned out that on both modes, as the half hour approached, I would be in a QSO that was more of a conversation than one of those 59(9) QSL QRZ? contacts. Anyway, it was fun, even in the small hours of the morning. Those “real” QSOs kept me going.
With the return of daylight, OP returned and resumed operating on the higher bands, on CW, FT8 and sideband. From where I was, it looked like he spent a lot of time fighting with the computer, but that’s just how I saw it.
Thinking about it, the operation was similar to our Field Day operations out at the Corkery Community Centre. We used an existing building to house the station, and set up antennas within 4 hours before the start of the event. If we had a generator up on the roof (or the ground below), it would have been a completely “2A” station in field day terms.
In the end, we ended up with 118 contacts on CW, 62 contacts on FT8, 38 on SSB, and 18 on 2m FM, both repeater and simplex. I’d say we finally put the HQ station back on the map.
Now we just have to figure out who holds the keys to the LOTW and QRZ pages for VA3RHQ.
73
Have fun hamming however you do it.
mk
Last Updated on 2024-12-23 by AdminOARC