Our goal for this year was to get together as a club for a few hours and have a social time while working the Winter contest. We began our adventure at 10AM when Ralph, VE7OM and Eric, VE7EGK opened the club and fired up the HF rig.

Ralph immediately got into action and tuned up 20 meters and within 60 seconds was chatting with a contester from Newfoundland. Shortly after, his second contact was with a station in Port Moody! Coast-to-coast within 2 minutes of our start. Stuart, VA7CRH who arrived just as Ralph was completing the first contact was most envious as he had never worked a Newfoundland station. After taking a few minutes to console Stuart's sense of loss, we were able to convince him to take the next shift at the radio where he promptly made several more contacts across Canada.

Ross, VA7NRW joined us around 11AM and also made several contacts in central Canada and the USA. By 2PM when we were wrapping up, we had made 58 contacts and had several pleasant chats with Hams across the country. We all felt it was fun getting together for the event and plan to do several in 2006.

While taking turns manning the radio the rest of us were studying the quality of a new Carolina Windom that Eric had just purchased. We felt it was well constructed and are looking forward to seeing how it performs once installed. Stuart saw some potential in a different model of the Windom for his own home station. Needless to say the Catalogue from Radio Works proved very tempting.