A Good Cold Snap

Winter has arrived in the Capital, Ottawa. Power is out this afternoon to about 17,000 people on the outskirts of greater Ottawa. There's been some terrible winds in excess of 50Km/hr and gusting higher out here near Metcalfe about 19 miles south of Parliament Hill. Temperatures have been dropping all day and stand at -12C at 3pm. Expected low temperatures overnight will hover around the -20C mark and that's not including the wind chill. Affected areas include: Orléans, Alexandria, Alfred, Clarence, Cumberland, Hawkesbury, North and South Plantagenet, Osgoode, Rockland, Russell, South Gower, and Winchester.

I've been listening to the Emergency Measures group repeater VA3MV, 146.985- (100.0Hz tone) but there's not much going on. Power in FN25fe has been on all day with no hiccups so far and the band conditions have been very very good on 20 meters. Last night 40 meters was extremely quiet; so quiet that I kicked in the preamp on the FT-950 so I could hear band noise. Signals really jumped out of the noise floor with very deep qsb on all the sigs.

My R6000 is surviving the windy onslaught largely due to the guying I installed when it went up a few weeks ago. I can see a very slight side to side movement of a couple of inches which isn't too bad. The PAR end fed dipoles of course are rugged enough for even Arctic use, which today's weather approximates very well.