History of VA3BMC
Originally, a small group of employees of what was then the Federal Department of Communications pooled their interests for an amateur radio repeater serving downtown Toronto. The location of the Toronto District Office at Yonge and St. Clair was key to the desired coverage, so the repeater shared antennas with the District Office monitoring facility. As the building was only 9 stories high with much clutter in the area, a side benefit of the repeater was a good understanding of what the monitoring facility was capable of seeing from an RF perspective.
The first frequency assigned to the group in 1991 from the Western New York Southern Ontario Repeater Council was 442.400 MHz. This was quickly found unsuitable for mobile use in the Toronto area. A local FM broadcast station on 99.9 MHz was very popular with listeners. Most automobile car radio local oscillator fourth harmonic tuned to this station could be heard with a UHF mobile on 442.400 MHz ((99.9 + 10.7 MHz local osc.) x 4 = 442.400 MHz). While a LO can only be heard for a distance of 50 m from a car radio, there were so many listeners tuned to 99.9 that we found the annoyance factor was high. Since other UHF frequencies were available at the time, 442.400 was returned to the pool for use in another community without a harmonically related FM station. 442.700 MHz was assigned as an alternate in 1992.
Eventually, key staff responsible for repeater maintenance left the employ of what was then the new, reorganized Industry Canada. The repeater was moved in the summer of 1995 to it's present location at Weston Road and Finch. It's callsign was changed to better reflect the new interests in the club repeater.