Eulogy for Anthony George Mountjoy
Eulogy for Anthony George MountjoyCARA Life MemberNovember 1, 1930 – June 03, 2022 Ken Oelke, VE6AFO, Doug Howard, VE6CID & Keith Mountjoy With sadness we announce the passing of Anthony (Tony) Mountjoy, beloved husband of Lillian Mountjoy, at the age of 91. Anthony, known as Tony to his family, friends and colleagues, was born and raised in Calgary where he remained and spent his life, married his wife Lillian and raised his family of four. Tony attended Western Canada High School majoring in automotive. In his senior year he helped rebuild the engine of the principal’s car. Tony and his brother Eric were actively involved in Boy Scouts with the 18th Boy Scout Troop. As a young man Tony became interested in Amateur (Ham) Radio, his primary hobby and passion, and was first licensed in 1953 and obtained his Advanced license in 1967. He was heavily involved volunteering many hours organizing and providing communications for sport events such as the Cookie After retirement, Tony and Lil travelled to many places. Australia was their first destination, as that was where daughter-in-law Pam was from and son Darcy and Pam were living there at the time. World travels also took them to New Zealand, England, Thailand, Hong Kong, Mexico, a Mediterranean cruise, an Alaska cruise, and Hawaii and Arizona on several occasions. Many winter holidays were spent with daughter Yvonne and husband Richard in the US. His first job was with Denton-Spencer, a company that did diamond drilling and coring. The company failed following one of the major shareholders dying in an accident. Tony tried several other jobs and eventually started working at Dekalb Petroleum as a draftsperson in 1966. He worked at Dekalb for thirty years in various positions, and when technology made< manual drafting obsolete, he ended as office manager. In his final year Dekalb was acquired by Apache and he stayed for one more year during the transition. During his Denton-Spencer days, he met Lillian (Lil) on a blind date, and they married shortly after. Tony’s passion in amateur radio was experimenting with weak signal VHF/UHF and working the new amateur radio satellites at the time, OSCAR III and IV. Tony was not interested in HF and did not pursue in getting his Advanced Amateur Radio License until 1967. With Tony’s passion in VHF communications, with VHF repeaters began to spring up in North America, Tony was right there. He proposed to the CARA Executive and Members the idea of installing a 2 metre repeater in CARA. The first mention of a CARA repeater was in December 1966 and was on the air by January 1967. The rest is history with the many repeaters CARA now own and operate. He left a legacy of repeaters in Calgary and area, but he did not stop there.
Left: Ken Oelke, VE6AFO (top) & Tony Mountjoy (bottom) on teh old CFCN (CTV) Television tower installing the ATV 400 & 900 MHz antennas. (April 25, 1992) Below - Right: Tony at VE6ROT
Above: Tony and crew getting ready to install 900 MHz ATV Antennas on CFCN Television Tower
Left: Doug Howard, VE6CID and Tony Mountjoy, VE6MX doing antenna maintenance work on the VE6RYC (146.25 – 600) Nose Hill Repeater site Tony was the recipient of the CARA Ham of the Year Trophy a number of times over the years. Tony was the Editor and Publisher of Key Klix for more years than probably any other person in CARA. He took care of production, when Key Klix was in printed form, and arranged mailing to the members. At one time, to save postage costs, he arranged for volunteers to deliver Key Klix on various routes that were within each volunteer local area. This saved CARA an enormous amount of money for postage. He was also the advertising manager to solicit paid ads in Key Klix to offset printing and mailing costs. When Tony’s health began to fail, he regrettably had to finally give up this volunteer position.
When I got interested in VHF, Tony was my mentor (Elmer) to guide me through setting up a mobile VHF transceiver in my 1966 Meteor. It was a GE Progress Line, which had to go in the trunk because it was that huge. It had a vibrator power supply to provide the high voltage for the tube plate voltage. The 4 pin ‘plug in’ vibrator gave more problems than you could shake a stick at! It was Tony to the rescue! The control head fit under the dash, with microphone and speaker. You know the kind, old police and taxi cab radios converted to the amateur radio bands. Yep, with the big huge carbon mike! I could go on, but it would end up becoming a volume. It would take months to compile and list all of Tony's accomplishments. RIP my friend |
Race, Jasper-Banff Relay, Kananaskis 100 Relay and others. Square dancing was also an activity enjoy by Tony and Lil. Golfing was his second passion, which he pursued vigorously in his retirement years and enjoyed playing a round with his family (children and grandchildren) whenever he could. He golfed for many years with a group of Calgary School Board retirees and his last round with them was at age 90.
Tony always had a dream to install a repeater on Plateau M
Tony built much of his equipment in the early days, including an amateur t
Right: 1989 Tony Mountjoy, VE6MX putting the 400 MHz link through the tests at the Porcupine Hills site for linking VE6ROT toVE6RYC
(Ed) When Tony was CARA President in 1968/1969, I was the C
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