This year the club gathered together to operate as a club in the annual RAC Winter Contest. We decided to practice setting up in the field as we did for field day this past June. We felt it would be good practice for emergency preparations, allow us to try some different configurations and get us together for a fun time.

Jim (VE7UVL) was our coordinator for the event. We elected to use the same location as per field day as it is central to us, has good access and openness, some public exposure and even washroom facilities! Being in White Rock proper we even had a visit from the fire chief. The set up went smoothly and quite quickly - we had Jim's new home built G5RV up in the air in little time and hooked to his travel radio well before our intended start at 10AM. The bands were busy and we were soon making contacts on 20m. at 11 we switched to 10m but found only a few stations so we dropped to 15m where we remained until 12:45 when we closed down. Most of our contacts were SSB with some CW at the tail end of our session.

Everyone who wanted to operate and log had a chance to do so and we all had a good time chatting with stations all over North America. We worked stations in the North West Territories, PEI and Quebec to name a few. After operating for 3.25 hours we had completed 81 contacts yielding us a contest score of 10,016.  Perhaps not a high score, but we met our objectives of setting up in the field, getting on the air successfully and enjoying ourselves. Here are a few photos from the event click them for a larger view.