Lancaster Bomber 80th Anniversary

 

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VE80LAN

In late February, the Special Events Committee learned of a Special Event occurring in March to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Avro Lancaster bomber’s first sortie in the Second World War.
There were more than 3700 Lancaster bombers built during WW ll and almost 500 were built here in Ontario. Only two remain today that are airworthy. One is located in Lincolnshire in England and we can proudly say the other one is located in Mount Hope, Ontario, just outside of Hamilton.
A contact was made with Rick Danby, VE3BK, the organizer of the event, by the Club Special Events Committee, offering help with the event. The offered help was gladly accepted and of the time given by Rick BK, the week of March 20th to March 25th was selected. As an added bonus, the weekend of the 26th/27th, the WPX Prefix Contest was given to us as an added bonus.

A team was quickly assembled, with Dave, VE3EI helping by sending out a blanket call to all Club members asking for volunteer operators to run the event. Doug, VA3DAE offered to help with the scheduling, producing an Excel platform which worked very well and clearly listed which operators were going to be working each day, and their respective time slots. Doug, VE3IDT offered to take on the somewhat onerous task of receiving each operator’s ADI file on a DAILY basis and combining them into one large file which was sent daily to Rick BK at his request. All the files sent to Rick BK were then uploaded daily to the eQSL website.

There were fifteen volunteers who came forward to help operate in this event.

In no particular order, they were:
VE3IMG, Rick VE3EI, Dave VE3IDT, Doug VA3DAE, Doug,
VE3YOB, Bogdan VA3ZLS, Luke VE3FTM, Roger VE3CBW, Craig
VE3OT, Mitch VE3TCO, Tanner VE3FOO, Rob VE3QVQ, Dave
VA3ATB, Brian VE3FBZ, Frank VE3KGK, David

John, VA3MSV kindly put his logging page at the disposal of the team so daily activities could be monitored.
The week went by quickly, and contacts piled up on HF, VHF, CW, and FT-8/FT-4. Prior to the week assigned, requests were received from Rick BK periodically, on very short notice, for someone to step in quickly to replace a scheduled operator who was not able to show up when scheduled. Some 700 contacts were made then.
Dave, VE3EI was unable to be in London during the scheduled week, so a request was made to Rick VE3BK to allow Dave to have some air time prior to his departure from London and he was able to operate on two different days prior to the Club’s assigned week, thanks to Rick’s generosity.
During the eight days assigned to the Club, 2389 contacts were made on the various modes. The hope was for 2000 contacts in that week and it is a credit to the operators that the hoped-for number was exceeded.
The Special Events Committee would like to thank the volunteers whose contributions made this a successful event, by any standard.
The London Amateur Radio Club would also like to extend its thanks to Rick VE3BK for entrusting the Club with the use of the VE80LAN call sign for fully one quarter of the length of the event.
Respectfully submitted by:
The Special Events Committee
Rick VE3IMG
David VE3KGK
March 28, 2022
 
 
VE80LAN STATS FOR LARC OPERATORS

 

VE80LAN STATS   LARC OPERATORS