11/13/2003 | VO1AA The NPR "Car Talk" guys, Tom and Ray, probably would call it a "historic, folkloric" ARRL November Sweepstakes. For the third year in a row, I operated the CW weekend from Canada--this time from Newfoundland.

Thanks to the assistance of Paul Piercey, VO1HE, I was privileged to operate VO1AA--the Society of Newfoundland Radio Amateurs (SONRA) club station in historic Cabot Tower. The site overlooks St John's Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. It's immediately adjacent to the spot where Guglielmo Marconi claimed to have copied the first radio signal--the Morse letter "s"--transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean. Marconi's antenna was held aloft by a kite, and that may not have been such a bad idea for my operation.

The tower was erected in the late 1890s to commemorate both the 60th year of Queen Victoria's reign and the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Newfoundland by explorer John Cabot.

"Bump! Bump! Bump!" was the near-constant backdrop as fierce winds battered the building. Contributing to my mediocre score was an hour or so of total radio blackout Sunday afternoon. That was preceded by intense echo for a time on some signals, which made even the strong ones extremely difficult copy. The slow times were punctuated by sporadic pileups of 10-15 stations or so, and the rate meter rarely went above 70. Outside of the occasional local, even the "loud" signals weren't showing on the S meter. This also was the Year of the Missing Mult for me, many of them also in Canada.

While ongoing solar flares, the high winds and an intermittent connection at the antenna feedpoint (Cabot Tower is a national historical site, and Parks Canada allows SONRA to erect only a single, multiband wire dipole) made operating--especially reception--difficult, it was a thrill to operate from this historic location and to provide a somewhat rare mult for other SS participants.

Many thanks to SONRA for letting me use their station and to Parks Canada for allowing me off-hours access to Cabot Tower!

Rick, N1RL -- N1RL