Club Members, Jim Wilkins, Ralph Web, Don & Pam Hamilton and Eric Kehler met at Blackie Spit to activate the park in the Parks on the Air Program. This would be the first club activation for the White Rock club in the POTA program. The special feature for today’s activation was the use of Don’s CrankIR vertical antenna.

Once the canopy and table was set up members proceeded to erect the CrankIR. The process had a few initial obstacles but it was soon in the air and Don was tuning it for the 20m band. With the use of a RigExpert analyzer the antenna was brought into resonance in the upper 20m band. The tuning was done by making slight length changes to the counterpoise. Very small changes could swing the resonance point quite widely.

Once tuned Eric began scanning the band for other operators and managed two contacts with other parks. Next up was Jim who made a long series of CQ’s eventually making a number of contacts. We returned the antenna for the lower portion of the band and Ralph proceeded to make 13 CW contacts. Then Jim returned to make more contacts to reach the 10-contact threshold. The antenna was switched to the 17m band and Eric tried some calls, there was no activity there but a local ham agreed to try calling us on the band and so we did complete a single 17m contact. Eric tried calling on 2m and managed to work a SOTA activator on Vancouver Island. As it was now 1pm we decided to pack up having completed 28 contacts. It was a successful day at the beach in the warm sun.