1990 Nechako River - Radio Antenna Set Up!
Communication was always an issue on the outdoor trips. In the early days, phone calls were the norm, but were dependent on finding a land line along the route. It was incredible that some of the news bulletins from these early trips were several pages long and sent out by mail every third day or so.
In the late ’70’s and early ’80’s we graduated to the single side band radios. The communication was spotty at times, and certainly depended on the set up of the radio antenna. As this photo shows, students on ‘radio crew’ had to be fairly ingenious to get the antenna set high enough and in the right direction in order to have the call reach the school.
What are your stories of setting up the radios? (Click on the title and scroll to the bottom to submit your memory. Click on the photo to see a larger version)
July 23, 2012 at 12:47 pm
There has GOT to be a story behind this picture. I had no idea that SJ had access to Tinkerbell’s Pixie dust. Must be hard to ‘think lovely thoughts’ while up there too.
July 24, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Those SBX radios. They were scary. At one point the Alberta school had it’s own base station. This allowed us to try to directly monitor. The other two prairie provinces had radios tied into the phone system.
We had radios with 4 crystals. One set to our own frequency, and three set to Saskatchewan and Manitoba base stations. I remember calling Vsomething calling Lac Brochet, do you copy. Silence.
We had a schedule. We would try direct on the hour every hour from the time we made camp to late at night. Again the next morning before we left. In between times, we would change frequencies, and try the phone system.
Despite all this, it was unusual to get through two days in a row. I’m glad that we never had a time sensitive emergency, say appendicitis, when this happened. (The only time we had a case we were within a few hours of town. Bundled the kid on a plane, and flew him out. One of the Harcotts I think.
If X days passed without contact, the school sent out a plane. That happened more than once. Expensive. I think X was 3, but in practice the plane didn’t come out until day 5 — you had to get the plane arranged, and they couldn’t always go when you wanted. They aren’t as common as taxis after all.
July 24, 2012 at 12:41 pm
We were somewhere in northern Saskatchewan. Came into an Indian camp. No one home, but the guy had a radio. So we used his antenna, and tapped into the phone system to call home.
Claude Schroder was courting Hillary Noblett at the time. After the school business was concluded, Claude asked to talk to Hillary. He looked at us. “Do you mind?” So we filed away. (But still within earshot.) He spoke to Hillary and sounded incredibly sappy as courting couples are wont to do.
Afterword, we pointed out that the radio was NOT a phone. Everything he said was picked up by every radio that was on that channel within 300 miles.
“Your kidding!”
“No joke.”
Claude turned bright red with embarrassment.
That evening we dragged Claude out to the radio, and listened for half an hour to all the conversations that took place while we were waiting for a chance to get a word in edgewise.
July 24, 2012 at 12:49 pm
On another time John Corkett, Clint Kelly and I were with the grade 8’s doing the Bloodvein. Radio had been spotty, but we got through, enough to tell them that we were ok.
About midway through the trip Clint was handling the radio and called with urgency to John and myself. The reception was awful. But we were able to make out. “Ontario…dead…several… dumping”
It was the news of Timiskaming. Staff were silent about it. Didn’t tell the kids. I suspect they knew something was up. We were unable to get even a bad connection during the next three days it took for us to get to the town of Bloodvein.
There, we found out the full extent of the the disaster. John presented the news to the brigade, and explored their reaction to it. Then he gave them a choice. End the trip here, or finish the trip. John presented it in a way that the overwhelming sentiment was to finish the trip. So we did.
July 25, 2012 at 12:33 am
Sherwood has a great memory to say the least. It was in fact Tyler Harcott with the appendicitis in the early ’80’s.
Something I have never forgotten has been the radio call signs that were used. I recall it was “XNR378 calling XNR379” or something to that effect.
July 25, 2012 at 7:14 pm
You too have a great memory! It was XNR378 and XNR379… I had totally forgotten that. Back at the school we had some wonderful evenings in the staff lounge waiting for the calls to come in from the trips.
July 26, 2012 at 3:54 pm
As I recall at SJCBS in the early years a short wave system was set up by mr. Doolin with the call letters VE4 SJC.
August 3, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Don’t remember the call sign but yes Frank set us up with with amateur short wave. I never saw the setup. The equipment at that point was still tube based, and portable was not a good description of it. Lugable? Reliable is also not a word I’d use.
The SBX radios ran at 7 and 5 megahertz — about 6-10 times the frequencies used by the AM band. 5 MHz has a wavelength of 60 meters. The most efficient antenna is a simple dipole with each arm 1/4 wave length — 15 meters on each side. So the wire part of the antenna was about a hundred feet long.
In theory, to work properly the antenna had to be half a wavelength off the ground 30 meters. We never could find trees that tall. Also, it had to be at right angles to the direction to the receiver, or at least within 30 degrees of that angle.
If the bare antenna wire touched a wet branch, the tree became part of the antenna, messing things up.
This kind of radio depends on bouncing a signal off the ionosphere to get beyond the horizon. Skip is determined by how active the sun is, time of day, and probably things that were thought to only affect the flavour of pizza.
Sometimes one antenna frequency was right to get through, while the other wasn’t. Many northern trips we took both antennas and try to get the school on the 5 MHz and Sasktel or Manitoba Tel on 7 MHz. (Mantel may have had yet another band…)
Being radio man on a trip was a pain in the butt. The radio itself travelled in your pack. along with the antenna. You had to pad it from shock, so usually your sleeping bag was stuffed around it. Putting up the antenna was as time consuming as cooking supper, and you were thrashing around in the bush and bugs or in the bush and rain doing it. Then for the rest of the evening you went out to try to call in every half hour or so.
(Later, the radio traveled in a pelican case. An improvement for packing in the morning, but meant another pack to watch through the day and make sure got over every portage. Hikes still had it in your pack, and unlike food, it never got any lighter as the trip progressed. Once we had Grade 12 pack mules on fall trips, we were able to slough the radio off on them)
We can and did get situations where two trips were a couple hundred kilometers apart. Both could hear the school, but not each other. This was one reason for oddball schedules. E.g. Juniors would attempt contact on the hour, intermediates would try at 15 past the hour, and seniors would try at 30 past the hour.
July 30, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Wow, you guys remembered the call #’s! Funny how those details can be locked in the vault at times…My first memory was actually of my brother calling home via the phone connection and how cool I thought it was that I had to say “over” when I finished a reply to him. I also have a fond memory of not only the precarious set up of the antennae once, but how quickly it was taken down when we fled the scene. We were at the beginning of the Methye trip (’80 I think) and the ground was scorched when we arrive at the beginning of the portage trail. Radio was setup and the RCMP I think basically told us to get the hell outta there. Needless to say we packed up the boats asap and headed back across the lake. We hadn’t been paddling half an hr when someone looked back to where we were only to see flames right where we were only a short time before. Needless to say we had to re-vamp part of the trip and bypass the portage due to forest fire, lucky for us on a couple counts, glad we had clear reception…and an able body to scale the tree for the antannae!