The Canadian Team gets help from local HAM radio experts

Two years ago, in Luesse, we learned the hard way how important it is to be able to reach our pilots on task to relay the latest weather and other information. Based on this experience we brought a powerful ground station and materials to rig a 4m tall antenna. Unfortunately, transmitting through this antenna during the practice days yielded disappointing results. In fact our simple, quarter wave car antenna turned out to be much better.Fortunately George knows a lot about HF transmission technology. Using the internet and his Hungarian language skills, he made contact with local HAM radio experts who came out to the field today with the necessary instruments to look at our antenna. It turned out that this particular antenna isn't designed for transmitting but for receiving and scanning. What adds further to the problem is that the Canadian Team frequency with 132.025 Mhz is at the top end of the VHF aviation band while antennas are typically optimized for the 122 Mhz range.

Since not much could be done to improve our antenna, our local experts, Gyulai Dezso and Provics Ferenc were so kind to offer to build a new antenna for us in the next few days. "Canada base" should soon have a much clearer voice. Please join me in thanking Dezso and Ferenc for supporting the Canadian Team in such a tremendous way! I will make sure to relay all your comments to them.

On a different subject: We are lucky to have our very own team photographer. Many of you have probably seen Maria Szemplinska's photos in Free Flight and Soaring.

Below are a few of Maria's pictures, capturing the action on the grid, the weather and the mood today:

All gliders have to go over scales as they are being towed out to the grid. Any glider found to be over its maximum take-off weight has to drop ballast water.

The grid boss and his line crew are relaxing before the launch. Once the launch starts, they will be running flat out to hook-up and launch 145 gliders in less than 50 minutes.

145 of the world's best sailplanes are assembled at the launch grid ready to race.