Barrie Crampton, VE3BSB, appointed to Canadian Amateur Radio Hall of Fame (CARHOF)
For immediate release | February 22, 2024:
The Board of Trustees of the Canadian Amateur Radio Hall of Fame is pleased to announce that Barrie Crampton, VE3BSB, has been named to the Hall of Fame. Radio Amateurs of Canada recognizes deserving Amateurs by appointments to the Canadian Amateur Radio Hall of Fame. The Constitution for the Hall specifies that the appointment as Member of the Hall is made for “outstanding achievement and excellence of the highest degree, for serious and sustained service to Amateur Radio in Canada, or to Amateur Radio at large”. The Trustees of the Hall have interpreted the Constitution to mean that the person has performed significant service over many years to enhance the well-being of Amateur Radio.
Barrie Crampton, VE3BSB, was first licensed in 1954 and was issued the call sign VE2WQ. In 1955, he built his first radio transmitter and receiver and later one of his mentors helped him obtain a Royal Air Force R1155 aircraft receiver. Shortly thereafter, he began working with Spartan Air Services on the herculean task of photographing the Canadian Arctic for government mapping purposes.
In 1958, Barrie moved to Stittsville, Ontario and received the call sign VE3BSB. In the winter of 1968, he assembled several Amateurs at his cottage to test out the use of VHF radio units on snowmobiles and the results showed the feasibility of VHF network communications for community emergencies such as in search and rescue.
When Barrie retired in the 1980s, he moved to Perth, Ontario where he met Don MacKenzie, VE3ULM, who was the joint owner of various towers in Lanark County for his own communications company. In the early 1990s, Barrie and Wayne Henwood, VE3ICF, approached Don about using his towers for a VHF repeater network and one of CTV/CJOH’s towers, with the help from Sandi Cameron, VE3AAC, a CTV engineer. It was this network that Barrie as Emergency Coordinator for this area drove forward, which eventually led to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Lanark County and the Lanark North Leeds Amateur Radio Emergency Service (LNLARES) to provide radio services in times of an emergency. The establishment of the LNLARES radio network proved extremely fortuitous as the 1998 Ice Storm was about to descend on Eastern Ontario. In Lanark County, many community hydro services from Southern Ontario arrived to help Ontario Hydro restore the electrical grid.
In the 2000s, Barrie worked with various schools in Lanark County through multiple initiatives to help them become more aware of Amateur Radio and its connection to space exploration. Responding to a request from a group of parents interested in establishing a school project as a team, he worked with the parents and members of the LNLARES group and assembled flight modules containing a camera and an APRS tracking transmitter to facilitate the launch and tracking of 15 helium weather balloons. They reached as far away as Maine and achieved an Amateur world record altitude of 130,000 feet.
In 2007, Barrie worked with Neil Carleton, VE3NCE and Al Niittymaa, VA3KAI, to arrange with Parks Ontario to have several archeologists communicate from their dig site at Murphy’s Point Hoggs Bay to Neil’s grade 5 classroom in R. Tait McKenzie School in Almonte. This was done through the LNLARES VHF Network to permit Neil’s students to talk directly with the archeologists with various questions about their work at the dig site. The answers of the archaeologists were transmitted from temporary stations set up at the excavation and examination sites by LNLARES.
Barrie led a team of Canadian Amateurs in installing a WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporting) beacon on the Polar Prince icebreaker during the Canada C3 Expedition – a 150-day expedition from Toronto, Ontario to Victoria, British Columbia via the Northwest Passage to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday. The WSPR station aboard the ship garnered the attention of Amateurs around the world who, through their reception and reporting, provided over 600,000 reception contacts and precise locations of the Polar Prince during its C3 voyage. The propagation data that the voyage generated was eventually provided to the Canadian government for researchers needing to know about radio frequency propagation in the Arctic.
Barrie has continued with his commitment to Lanark County with a mapping project on the historical settlement of a large part of Lanark County. He also served as Deputy Reeve of Tay Valley Township during the pandemic and was very active in the LNLARES radio activities. Barrie continues to work on the updating/modernization of the County’s Amateur Radio network along with members of LNLARES, Almonte Amateur Radio Club and the Renfrew County Amateur Radio Club. In recognition of his outstanding community service work, Barrie was chosen as a recipient for the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.
Radio Amateurs of Canada and the Board of Trustees of CARHOF sincerely congratulate Barrie Crampton, VE3BSB, on his appointment to the Hall of Fame.
A detailed account of his achievements will be presented in an upcoming edition of The Canadian Amateur magazine.
For more information on the Canadian Amateur Radio Hall of Fame please visit: https://wp.rac.ca/carhof/
Prepared by Frank Davis, VO1HP
Chair, Board of Trustees
Canadian Amateur Radio Hall of Fame