RNH Service August 23, 2015
The West parking lot at Piccadilly Mall was the meeting point for a small army of SARC members at 1000 hours on Sunday, August 23rd. Nine of us – Robin/HMN, Phil/BPU, Mike/LOG, Ron/RLE, Simon/SLG, Dave/HDY, Darrell/IU, Patrick/FAT, Bill/WTT – two Ford 350 crew cabs and a small Jeep assembled in preparation to mounting an expeditionary force to the RNH site on Granite Peak to re-install the radio equipment that had been damaged in the break in last fall and repair the recent round of vandalism. The drive to the site took about an hour, over some rough gravel sections of road going up the face of the Fly Hills. Once we were at the site we set up two Honda generators to provide power for lights and electric hand tools. A plywood panel had to be removed from the porch wall so that we could move the radio equipment in as the stairs were unsafe. Robin took charge of getting the radio equipment back in place while Phil and Patrick got on with putting up the new UHF antenna and running of the co-axial cable. While the technical aspects were being taken care of the remaining crew got on with putting up a steel plate over the new hole in the wall and tearing out the wreckage of the old stairs. Using scrap lumber, that Ron was only too anxious to get rid of, we rebuilt the outside stairs and repaired the interior stairs. Repairs to the framing around the door and the door frame itself were also necessary in order for the door to be closed. As an added touch we crafted a new locking mechanism to keep the door closed. (See attached pictures) It is important to note that none of this carpentry work would be featured in a Homes and Garden magazine, nor would it meet the building code.
Normally aligning the UHF antenna with the AHR site would be a simple visual effort but due to the heavy smoke haze I understand that Phil had to do some guessing and used marks from the previous antenna on the mast to make the alignment. Other technical work involved re-installing the Daniels radios, duplexer, a new SRMT 2430 charge controller, a new UHF antenna and new co-axial cable from the antennas to the radio equipment. The equipment was then calibrated, battery voltages checked and batteries topped up with water. RNH is once again operational and went through an inaugural test for the Sunday night net. Unfortunately there is some variable background “noise” that seems to be linked to the UHF antenna. This is causing some head scratching and discussion as to the reason for the noise which, hopefully, will lead to a quick solution.

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Six of the Club’s members met at the Fas Gas station at the north end of the Squilax bridge at 1100 hours on Saturday, May23rd before heading up to our AHR repeater on the nearby Adams Hill.  Phil/VE7BPH, Dave/VA7HDY, Mike/VA7MK, Bill/VA7WTT, Darrell/VE7IU, Richard/VE6DSF departed the service station for the trail head located at the intersection of the Loakin Bear Creek Road and Holding Road.  We unloaded the quads, three of which were generously provided by Bill, and once all gear was loaded up we were on our way up the mountain.  The ride was on an old, unmaintained access road so progress was cautious and took nearly an hour to reach the repeater at the top.  We saw reasonably fresh bear tracks and scat on the way but felt we had safety in numbers.

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I completed teaching the ROC(M) course 02 March to the Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue – RCM-SAR – group in Sicamous.  Twenty one took and passed the course that is provided by the Canadian Power and Sail Squadrons.  We are coming closer to providing monitoring on Channel 16 for boaters on the Shuswap and Mara Lakes with VHF radios in their boats.  While cell phone service is improving on the lake, cell phone batteries can die and a cell phone call is only to one person whereas a distress call on a VHF radio is heard by all listening.  All the more reason to put a VHF radio in your boat.

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