The local high wire act
Checking out the neighbours today, radiowise. I’d done the usual groundwork, by looking up the locals in the callsign database. And, there was an anomaly. One address, a cluster of calls. Time to go and see what their installation had, up, to get on the air.
At home, I have a decent multiband vertical, with a reasonable set of radials. I have a homebrew dipole or two. Satisfying, until now. From this point on, my setup will qualify as tiny, compared to the installation we saw near the shore on the north side. No space here to enumerate the towers and beams, but the contest installation of K1ZM is enough to make certain nations envious. Enough. From now on, I firmly resolve to make up for my physical shortcomings with skill.
After a quick visit to the railway museum, where I offered to repair part of an exhibit (before the end of the summer), we decided to head off toward the PEI National Park. I’d purchased the season pass, so my last excuse for avoiding the tourist ghetto had disappeared. At the first tollbooth the guards didn’t even notice the waving tag in my hand. Off to see what draws the visiting hordes (sand and a lack of parking space). The park is split into sections, so within the hour we’d already left the Stanhope/Brackley leg to start west in “civilian lands”.
A warning to the miserly. Ice cream in the tourist area is pricey (one notch below priceless).
In the Cavendish area, we visited a condo development, if only to see how the richer sort live, and then continued to enjoy the scenery enroute to Kensington and beyond. Tourists we may be, but we’re no less cynical.
