February 1-2, 2020
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
The first weekend in February is when the Orca DX and Contest Club holds it's BC QSO Party - an event to encourage BC HAMs to get on the air. This contest is unique to BC in that participants attempt to make QSOs with BC stations in all 42 BC federal electoral districts. This makes for a real challenge, and for longer QSOs as a good portion of the time you're trying to figure out in which federal electoral district a BC station's QTH resides.
Earlier in the week, Kevin VE7XY had contacted Mike VE7KPZ and Jane VE7WWJ to see if they would want to work the contest together. This sounded like a good idea so Mike pushed off some work to a colleague and Jane closed up her studio to free the weekend to "play radio".
A couple of options for locations were proposed. The first was at BEAR, but Mike VE7FI could not make the event and so we had to look elsewhere. Next was the OCARC Chute Lake HAM shack, but Kevin really wanted to go camping. So, the decision was to head out of Kelowna towards the actual Chute Lake on the Gillard FSR and see what nice spot we could find.
Kevin had already done some reconnaissance on Friday night, so he knew there were some nice spots just outside of town with great views back towards the metropolis of Kelowna. The QRM would be low so we'd have a good chance at making lots of QSOs.
Saturday morning early, Mike and Jane rolled into Kelowna's Mission district to meet Kevin at It's A Bakery. With coffees in hand, the group then proceeded to find a site. The area had suffered a forest fire in 2003 and was eerily beautiful. A burnt but solid tree was found that would be the endpoint for Mike's HyEndFed Field Day EFHW antenna.
Winds were high, so setting the line into the tree by hand was tricky. Kevin will plan to adapt his crossbow for line setting duties on future endeavours. We did finally get the line set and the antenna erected.
At the Unimog end the antenna was 5m off the ground. At the far end it was around 7 meters high. Testing the antenna, SWR was low so that meant it was high enough. Plus, with 80m going long these days, a little bit closer to NVIS might be useful as we really wanted to work BC. The antenna was oriented North-South.
Once operating from the Unimog's heated camper, all was good in the world.
We chose to run Mike's Yaesu FT-891 in contest mode (so the fan runs more) at 80 watts for SSB phone, powered from the camper's battery system and solar panel. We had a nice relaxing time pressing the voice keyer button, again and again and again.
The QSO rates were not that high for some reason - perhaps everyone was spent after Winter Field Day the weekend before or it may have been the Super Bowl football event that was taking place that Sunday. However, in the end, the team was able to capture many BC stations and their associated electoral districts to score a second place overall in the single operator low power phone only category.
Highlights of the weekend included good BBQ (Kevin brought his Weber Q), good food, good drink, good company and some pretty good QSOs for the contest. One notable QSO was W6MZ 4 watts QRP from San Diego on 20m (about S3 for us over an S0-S1 noise floor).
Big thanks to all of our local Okanagan stations that somehow found us on 20m (ground wave) and got in our log.
73s,
Mike VE7KPZ
NORAC Vice-President 2017-2020 and BC QSO Party 2020 participant
Ps: pics from this article and quote from Rebecca Kimoto VA7BEC, the coordinator of the BCQP, will be included in the July/August 2020 edition of the ARRL's National Contesting Journal. The article "Taking QSO Party Contesting To The Next Level" can be found on pages 9 and 10. Thanks to NCJ editor Scott Wright KØMD for reaching out and including us in the article. It's great to have our roving fun and the BCQP showcased in NCJ.