I took a few years off from amateur radio, but returned to the hobby last summer. In the intervening time, I gained full HF privileges because Industry Canada changed the rules and anyone who had been a licensed amateur radio operator for at least three or four years at the time (I think) was grandfathered in.

As I mentioned in a blog entry last summer, some of the first stations I talked to on HF were lighthouses and lightships. Recently, I operated VC3R at the Ottawa Locks and talked to a station on an island off the coast of Maine near the Canadian border. Yesterday, I received the QSL cards from him for QSOs as both VC3R and VE3XGD. On the certificates were the numbers for a couple of lighthouses that he had activated for his event. This got me thinking back to last summer, so I did some googling and found the Amateur Radio Lighthouse Society’s website again. Reading through it, I decided to join the society. This morning, I received an email confirming that I am now ARLHS member #1489. 🙂

This is the first amateur radio-related organization I’ve joined that’s not a club, excluding RAC. I’m looking forward to activating a lighthouse event station sometime this summer.

Yesterday, the Rideau Canal celebrated its 175th anniversary and its recent inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site List. To help celebrate, I proposed to the Rideau Canal people that the Manotick Amateur Radio Group operate a special event station, VC3R, at the Ottawa Locks. Their response was incredibly positive and they provided us with all sorts of on-site support. We had a tent, tables, chairs, as much electricity as we could use and lunch. About half a dozen club members showed up Saturday morning around 8am and unloaded our equipment. We set up three HF antennas in the trees around the site: a G5RVjr used by one radio; and a long spring antenna and a long wire antenna that we used by another radio. We also had a VHF/UHF station running and someone showed up with a Dstar HT, which is a new type of digital radio.

Darin (VE3OIJ) brought his digital mode stuff, so we basically had every operating mode, except CW and SSTV, covered. (Ironically, Darin apparently put his CW key by the door but forgot to grab it on the way out.) He was pleased to report log the first QSO of the day.

I had one QSO with a station on Moose Island, a small island off the coast of Maine near the Canada-US border, who boomed in at S9+10, but in general the conditions were poor. Naturally, just before we started packing up at the end of the day the conditions were improving.

Still, we had a good day and for a first-time event station we did quite well. The plan for VC3R is to operate at other lock stations along the Rideau Canal between now and the end of the summer.

A special thanks goes out to the Rideau Canal staff, the people who stopped by the tent and to my fellow hams who helped operate the station.

The 2006 RAC Winter Contest ran from 0000 UTC to 2359 UTC December 30, 2006. I headed out to the parking lot at the south end of the Champlain Bridge and “played radio” for several hours.  Most of the time I was there, I was fiddling with my new digital mode interface that allows me to operate RTTY, BPSK and a slew of other digital modes.  Once the battery on my laptop died, I switched to voice and worked 12 stations in just over an hour using my special event callsign, CG3XGD.  These twelve QSOs gave me 500 points for my entry in the single-op, all bands, low power (< =100 W) category.  This is the first time I’ve entered a contest and I have to admit it was a lot of fun.  I heard more Canadian stations in the 70 minutes or so I was contesting than I have since starting on HF after getting back into the hobby last summer.

While driving home from some errands this afternoon, I was able to work LZ1900K on 20m. This is a little milestone of sorts because it is the first mobile HF DX QSO that I’ve had (the other QSOs have been when I was parked somewhere). And, it seems that LZ1900K is a special event station commemorating the 1900th anniversary (!) of the proclamation of the ancient city of Pautalia (modern Kyustendil) by Roman imperor Mark Ulpiy Trayan for municipia (province center), including right of the city to issue coins, which makes it even more special. He reported that I was a “59” (no noise on my signal and very strong), while I reported him as being a “56” (no noise, not as strong as an S9). Very cool!

A few entries ago, I talked about QSL cards. These are the cards that amateur radio operators exchange to confirm they’ve communicated. There are many reasons to do this, some related to amateur radio contests to simply because they’re a neat thing to have. I sent my first batch out a couple of weeks ago and so far I’ve received two in return. I’m going to scan the cards as I receive them and add them online to my QSL gallery.

Now that I’m an active ham again, I’ve rejoined the Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC). The represent amateur radio operators’ interests at various levels and are the Canadian equivalent of the ARRL. Among other benefits, I’ll be able to use the outbound QSL Bureau service, so it shouldn’t cost as much to send QSL cards.

Well, I’ve had my mobile HF rig for a couple of weeks now and I’ve made some contacts on HF, though most of them have been while stationary rather than while actually driving. Coming back into Ottawa from a friend’s cottage on Sunday, however, I was almost able to work a station in Denver, but the band faded before we could establish a QSO. Oh well.

One of the major problems I had to overcome was interference from the various electronic bits that make my Tracker go. I resolved most of them with a pair of clip-on ferrite cores mounted on the power leads right up by the radio. It’s amazing how effective they are. Without them, I had QRM from the vehicle measuring about S6 or S7 — basically blotting everything out. With them, it’s virtually eliminated and using the noise blanker feature in the radio anything left over is pretty much eliminated. Not bad for $3.50, eh?

I’ve also sent off my first batch of QSL cards (click the picture to see a larger version). Most of them were to lighthouses and lightships that were taking part in an on-the-air event a couple of weekends ago, mostly to US stations. One card, however, went off to Portugal for a station that I talked to from the cottage that was on a dxpedition to one of the islands in the Azores.