[Harrie VE3HYS found a video showing the installation of the original tower and buildings at Camp Fortune, where the VE2CRA repeaters live.]
We all know that height is your best friend when operating at the higher frequencies. That’s why most repeaters are on office towers or hilltops. These are prime pieces of real estate and now cost a lot of money to rent space on. The video below describes how the facility came to be at Camp Fortune that has allowed our club to have a repeater since 1964, now 60 years as of 2024.
In 1961 radio station CFRA undertook two massive projects at the same time. The first was to move CFRA from Ryan Farm at Baseline and Woodroffe south of the city to Bankfield and Cedarview. As part of this move the station frequency changed from 560 kHz to 580 kHz and the transmitter power was increased from 10 kW to 50 kW. The second part of the project was to put CFMO on the air at the top of Camp Fortune. A new assistant chief engineer, George Roach, VE3BNO, was hired to help. Ultimately George put the VE2CRA repeater on the air in 1964 at the Camp Fortune site.
It has been said that Frank Ryan, founder of CFRA, was very thrifty. Why buy new when you have a perfectly good building and towers sitting empty at the old 560 site. Just because they date to the early days of CFRA (1947) should be no reason to start fresh, right? The concrete pad that was poured by helicopter was about 3 inches bigger all around the building, no wasted concrete there. The video doesn’t really do justice to the skills of the helicopter pilot. The building was put on the very top of the hill and the tower base was positioned about 10 feet below the building floor. With everything on the top of the hill that meant three of the four guy anchor points would be down the hill. Two of them a long way down the hill, distance across the ground of several hundred feet. The helicopter pilot needed to hold the hover long enough for the ground crew to unroll the guy wires and get some tension on each one before the helicopter could release the tower. This tower was replaced in December 2012 with a 100 foot self-supporting tower.
Harrie VE3HYS
High Tower video from April 17, 1962 (digitized from original film)
Additional information
An article about Spartan Air Services by Rénald Fortier for Ingenium – Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation: https://ingeniumcanada.org/channel/articles/your-mission-should-you-choose-to-accept-it-is-to-move-stuff-around-spartan-air
There is a reference to the film in the Library of Congress: https://archive.org/stream/libraryofcongres196367librrich/libraryofcongres196367librrich_djvu.txt
Some info about Spartan Air Services: https://www.helis.com/database/org/ca_spartan_air_services_ltd/
A book author looking for info on Spartan Air Services: https://sites.google.com/site/spartanairservices
Last Updated on 2024-01-05 by AdminOARC