Our White Rock club was one of the 10 stations participating in the event this year. Ralph (VE7OM), Deme (VE7CRT) and Ken (VE7KBN) joined Eric (VE7EGK) at his home to activate our club station - VE7DB. The test began at 9AM and proceeded till around 1:30. The four of us had a good time refining our technique in passing formal traffic. It was the first time that two of us had been involved with formal message traffic.

We utilized an IC-7000 HF radio to work with net control and receive some of our messages as well as an IC-208H 2m radio to receive messages from Delta. In total we worked 23 messages. The process was for each of the 10 stations to form a loop for message passing. Each station always sent to the same down stream station and received from the same upstream. Our upstream was the Delta club and we sent to Langley. Each club was to formulate two messages and start them into the loop and then wait for their return to check for accuracy. Our first message came back with only a minor error in the preamble - the 4 in the date was dropped. Our second message lost a word however! Each group also sent a 3rd party message to a station who had to deliver it via phone.

So though we were busy with the traffic we also had a good time chatting about things between messages - the doughnuts and muffins were a good help as well. It was the consensus of all of us that we would like to do this again. Perhaps in the Spring as being prepared to help in an emergency is a valuable skill. As a newbie to ham radio I felt the mentoring offered by Ralph was a tremendous benefit, his experience is a valuable skill for the amateur community and I am glad he is willing to share it.