Burnaby Mountain

It being Labour Day, it was a good day to get out and activate another park in the Parks-on-the-Air program. For today’s adventure I selected the park on Burnaby Mountain. This location has the bonus of hosting a segment of the Canada Trail. If you operate near the trail, you can get a double activation.  With Ralph’s agreement that became our plan for the day.

We set out from my place at the regular hour and soon we had a coffee in hand and setting out for the park. The drive was only about 35 minutes so not too long of a drive. We had the extra bonus of being able to work fellow club member Ken. Normally he works us while we are at a park, this morning he was activating and we were able to support his adventure. In fact, he was at Burnaby Mountain Park. When we arrived in the parking lot, he was still there doing a few last calls. We chatted for a few minutes before heading out to explore the area and check for where the trail was.

The parking lot was half closed for construction as the University was building an emergency service road across the hill at this point. This area of the mountain is cleared and mostly grass covered and though grassy it does have a good angle to it. We made our way across the slope to the pavilion commemorating the donations made to building the local segment of the trail. The up-slope portion of the trail was blocked as it was where the new road was being built. We did travel up slope a bit and saw a nice location for Ralph to operate in. Down-slope along the trail we came across a couple of benches one of which I selected for my location. We then returned to the car to gather our equipment. Ken was still there and asked about the findings. He was then off for home and we started back across the grass for my bench.

I set up a new little portable table that my friend Jim had built, it worked quite well offering a bigger surface than my small canvas table. It was fairly fast to assemble but still slower than my canvas table. I soon had the mast in the air though it was slightly angled due to the slope. I then finished the radio set up and called Ralph. I had a few issues getting him as my handheld was not on the correct frequency. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t notice it at first but eventually I got it corrected. Today we would be trying my two new Baofeng radios. They have a new radio band for us to use, the 222Mhz band. Once I had the frequency fixed, we switched to the 70cm (440Mhz) band and tried. I could hear him on the radio but he could not hear me. I discovered that I had programmed the frequency with a repeater offset. I switched to a direct entry setting and we completed the contact, then we tried the 222 band. That went smoothly and we continued with the eight HF bands. We had 11 contacts logged across the two parks giving both of us a count of 44 log entries! We were now ready to make a few more distant contacts.

I moved to the 15m band and made some calls. It was slow going but I managed 3 contacts – New Mexico and Missouri, and Ken had arrived home and gave me a contact. I then moved to the 17m band and made 3 more contacts there - California, Colorado and Maryland. It was almost time to pack up so I moved to the 20m band and scanned for some other park activators. I found a two-operator station in Utah and worked them. They were appreciative of the double park contact.

During my time operating I was being passed by numerous groups walking the trail. A few of which stopped to ask what I was up to. One chap was particularly interested and I gave him one of my brochures about POTA. As I folded up and packed my last piece, I saw Ralph coming down slope. We loaded his stuff into the cart and we made our way back to the car. Neither of felt like a drink for the trip home so we skipped a stop at Starbucks and followed the road to the highway and from there, home. Traffic was fairly light so we made good time. It was a nice day on the mountain, not too hot as the cloud cover persisted for the time we were there. It was warm enough just not hot. Perhaps our next park will be back on the north shore, there are still 7 more neither of us have activated still to do.