[html] This weekend brought a lot of people out of the weeds on VHF/UHF/ and above because of the contest that was being held… I missed the Sunday morning group but Sunday evening brought a lot of us together and Bob, VE6BLD, and myself worked a lot of stations mainly north of us on these bands…The biggest thrill for me was working Grant, VE6TA on 1296.100 Mhz who lives approximately 100 miles north of me….My equipment is mainly setup for satellite uplink operation and doesnt have a Tx/Rx relay so I hade to swap the 7/8 hardline back and forth to work him totally on this band…We used CW at first and then switched to SSB and had a short QSO which was actually quite strong in signal stength…Grant is using a 18 foot dish right on the ground with about 600 watts looking through trees (EME setup) but I was only running about 30 watts into a 25 turn helical which has a bad SWR at this freq and is about 45 feet high and also looking right through a bunch of trees…Skip [/html]
Submitted by VE6BGT [/html]

[html] There has been a new Net created to spark more activity on the higher bands� like VHF and UHF…Every Sunday morning at 10AM we meet on 144.200 and see who can work who on USB….Some of us run high power and large ant arrays and others run smaller equipment, it’s all open for the experiment…Then we also meet Sunday evening at 8 PM local time to try it again as some of us can’t make the morning get together…

I made a schedule with Doug, VE5UF who lives by Saskatoon to see if we could make the connection…The first night I got the freq we were going to meet on mixed up so we missed each other and the rest of us continued on..The following day (Monday) we rescheduled by e-mail and tried it again…I had everything all set up and was working on something else when I heard him tune up just before the scheduled time….So I called him and we had a good QSO for about 15 minutes, this is a distance of just around 300 miles… Doug was able to record the audio from me and send it around to the SSB group…The signal was moderate and then become very strong then faded again a little but we were able to hear each other fine the whole QSO…In the recording you can only hear me as his audio is not connected to the computer to be recorded…
This is the farthest I have worked with using meteor scatter etc….We are going to do it on a regular basis to see if it was just conditions or see if this path is possible regularily…..Skip, VE6BGT
Submitted by VE6BGT