Robert Burnaby Park

Ralph and I hoped to activate another new park – for us – in the parks-on-the-air program. Ralph is only couple away from getting his 100 parks award so he is quite motivated to get out there. We didn’t feel like driving to the north shore today but Burnaby seemed reasonable and there are a few more parks in that city which we haven’t visited yet. The Robert Burnaby Park was one of them and from the map it looked to be a nice size where we could spread out. It became our target for the day.

We left my place around 10:45 making a b-line for some coffee. Then it was off to the park. We made good time along the roads and soon we were driving into the large almost empty parking lot. The area is quite hilly and the lot was carved out of the slope near the south-end which was the higher side. Once parked we set out for a walk to explore the immediate area. There were a couple of benches right next to the lot with grass on the other sides. Ralph felt it would be a nice location for him to use.

We walked down the slope across the very wet grass and explored some of the area. There were ball courts and a kids play area numerous huge cedar trees. We wandered towards the kid’s area and found a number of picnic tables. These looked ideal for my set up and one was quite close to the road we drove in on. We returned to the car and unloaded Ralph’s gear which he carried the short distance to the nearby bench I then drove the car around to the road next to the table I had seen and parked alongside the road there.

I then made a couple of trips carrying my stuff to the table. It was close enough I didn’t bother with the cart. I then went about setting up the antenna and radio much as always. Once done I called Ralph on my 2m hand-held. He wasn’t quite ready yet so after a few more minutes he got back to me and we logged our first contact, a 2m FM call. We then proceeded to complete a 222Mhz and 440Mhz hand-held contact followed by 8 HF contacts with our main radios. We had 11 in our logs, the time now being 12:15. We decided we would operate until 1pm calling on the various HF bands.

I started on 15m, I scanned the band but couldn’t hear any of the stations listed. I started calling but after 10 minutes I gave up and moved to 17m After another 5 minutes of calling I was just about to move to 20m when I had a response from a station in Oklahoma. At least someone was hearing me. I had checked my output power and antenna all was good but I was getting no responses. After a couple more minutes of no further responses I Moved to 20m. Again, I scanned the band but could only hear a couple of the stations those extremely weakly. I started calling and after 15 minutes I still had no further contacts come in.

At this point a chap walking his dog came by. He was also a fellow ham – Doug – we chatted for awhile talking about how bad the bands were this morning. There had been a strong solar mass ejection earlier in the week and it had hit Earth earlier today. It was strong enough that it wiped out a lot of HF communication and my results for the day were evidence of how much it affects communications. Ralph called to say he had managed 3 contacts during the time and felt it was time to pack up. I agreed and we closed down our stations. I managed only the one contact beyond those with Ralph.

Though the radio part of our time was less than what we had hoped for, getting out in the fresh air and discovering a new park are still quite worthwhile. I enjoyed chatting with the chap that came by and over-all I felt that the day was still a success. Doing the 11 contacts between us saved the day on this adventure, it takes the pressure off having to make ten remote contacts. Hopefully on our next park the band conditions will be better.