Chilicon 2012–A Resounding Success

The annual Chilicon put on by the Ottawa Valley QRP group turned out to be a resounding success despite torrential rainfall on Friday night. This didn’t dampen those hardy campers from fulfilling a superb fun filled weekend at the Rideau River Park along the beautiful Rideau River near Kemptville.

I operated by small portable station, an FT-817, my NUE-PSK digital qrp modem, and my experimental version 0.06 St. Louis vertical (construction article coming up in my next posting here). Didn’t get as much operating done due to the nature of amateur radio ops being out in the wild. Most of the day encompassed walking around to various sites rag chewing with the various operators and admiring the ingenuity of their portable setups. There was some very nice equipment and innovative antennas and Mike’s (VE3WMB) homebrewed magnetic loop gave me a few ideas for one of my own. I managed to work a station in Slovenia with 2 watts out to my St. Louis Vertical, so it’s doing a very good job of getting out for a hastily constructed portable antenna.

I met some old friends at Chilicon this year as well as many new faces and I do hope that next year’s Chillycon (renamed due to lack of actual chili, but aptly re-badged to reflect the frigid night temperatures endured by the hardy group this year and last.)

Here are a few photos that I managed to take in between operating and chatting with the QRP members.

An excellent weekend despite rain on Friday and a little on Saturday. The weekend culminated with some very large excellent pizzas from a local restaurant in Kemptville.

Conspicuous by his absence was Martin VA3SIE who had to work and we’re hoping to see him next year. Martin, there was an excellent cache of single malt scotches at one of the campsites if that’s any enticement for attending next year’s “Chillycon”.

The OV-QRP Yahoo group can be found here for more details on this year’s Chilicon.

Here We Are, Again

Here’s my first blog post in a good long while. I figured it was time to get things going again and this post will be about some current projects here at VE3MPG.

A station photo is in order now that the shack is clean and tidy (somewhat). This varies day to day, hour to hour.


I’m located in part of the basement called the “bunker” – 2 windows, one facing due south the other to the east so I get some nice sunlight most days even during the winter months. Power to the station is supplied by a dedicated 120V line and a second, share 120V line. Both have APC uninterruptible power supplies to condition and smooth the AC coming into the shack. In the event of low voltage or complete loss of power the APC units shut down the computers gracefully and a small utility lets me monitor line voltage and power interruptions. The APC units prevent power surges from reaching my equipment, but a good ground is necessary.

The next posting will be about Part II of the St. Louis Vertical article from April 2010. Hope to be completed with testing and construction in time for the annual Chilicon qrp outing at the Rideau River Campground on September 14th and 15th sponsored by the Ottawa Valley QRP Society.

That's it for now.