MIRA Winter Field Day — Jan 25/26, 2025
It’s Done!!
Winter Field Day for 2025 has come and gone and MIRA was there for almost the whole thing with a fantastic showing of 16 paticipants, 117 contacts on CW and Phone and a final score of 1240!
It was a brisk, cold but clear weekend as we started preparations on Friday afternoon. The tent from the OECT trailer went up pretty quickly, but we found that the tents we borrowed from the Emergency Support Services group didn’t have any sides! Eeek! Not much good in the cold and if a wind had come up — sheesh 🙁
Fortunately, Peter VA7PWT and Al VA7MP were up to the task and brought in tarps from home which we jury-rigged into a pretty comfortable shelter. Kelly VA7KGW also VERY KINDLY provided his diesel-powered heater/blower which kept the ‘voice shack’ nice and cozy.
We used two antennae this year. The ‘CW’ shack used Don VE7AX’s fan dipole, and the voice tent used a combination of Frank VE7DSN’s ever-popular NVIS antenna and Don VE7ATJ’s POTA/SOTA vertical buddipole.
Working at the Parksville Fire Training yard had definite advantages, as the on-site classroom provided a place to warm up, grab a coffee and use the facilities when needed. 🙂
Setup on Friday took about 2 hours (we couldn’t quite finish all the tarping on the voice tent) but we were pretty much ready to go.
Saturday, the official start was 8am, but we decided that was a bit early so we got ‘on the air’ about 8:30 or so. The bright sunshine really helped with our spirits, despite the cold. We quickly found that while the Training Ground was a good site for access, it was very noisy from an HF radio perspective– S5 to 7 noise levels on almost all the bands. Oh well… we made the best of it and it seemed that everyone had a good time.
We had one brief interruption in the morning, as someone had forgotten to tell the ‘trash car delivery guys’ that we were on site. So, we had to take down part of the antennae for a few minutes while they dropped off a car for the Fire team to practice on. They were great about it!
Ron VE7RQX brought along his Starlink setup to show us how it worked. It’s pretty quick and easy and provided wide-area WIFI connectivity throughout the entire Training Ground area.
We were thinking that we wouldn’t stay overnight on Saturday as it was getting very cold after the sun went down so we shut it all down about 5pm and came back on Sunday about 8am. Not much on the air on Sunday, but we made a few contacts.
We shut down just around noon on Sunday (we were allowed to go until 2pm, but things were really slow) and we packed up pretty quickly. As noted, the site was good from an access PoV, but next year we will probably pick something more in the public eye and closer to the water.
