FD wouldn't be fun without challenges. I've always operated with in a club setting. That in itself is a challenge but meeting that challenge will assist in developing interpersonal skills!
As to the things I remember. One of the first FDs I operated we were working Saturday evening and heard "CQ this is ??BE--Beer Everywhere". We got a good laugh from that. One year the ops were puzzled as aiming the tribander (TA-33) east resulted in a lot of west coast stations and vice versa. After staring at the antenna for a bit I came to the conclusion that the reflector and director were reversed on the boom. Some years ago we used the same antenna and it was marked wrong. This time a quick search of the Web brought up the manual and the owner was convinced of the marking error. The antenna worked as expected. Weather is always a factor on the central plains. One year can be blazing hot such as 1993 with the Enid ARC (Oklahoma) when I think it was something like 113 that Saturday afternoon. I drank water all afternoon and never sweated or went to the latrine. Promptly at 1PM on Sunday we tore down in record time and I left the gear in the truck until around sundown when the temp got down to the high 90s or so. The next year the temps were more reasonable and operations were going well. As we settled in for the overnight run we got word over the repeater of a storm front that was moving down from south central Kansas. The park pavilion we were using had no sides, only a roof. After an hour or so it became apparent we were in the direct path of the storm. I suppose we considered a few options but settled on putting the gear--radios and computers--on the picnic tables, sitting amongst the piles of gear with blankets and sleeping backs with our backs to the incoming storm. It was an impressive sight watching the rain blow horizontally through the pavilion! The one-lung generator never missed a beat and kept our lights on through the storm. No gear nor ops were lost. Seems we should have gotten bonus points for that one! Once the storm cleared the first thing to put back in operation was the coffee pot. Priorities. 73, Nate, N0NB -- "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." Web: https://www.n0nb.us Projects: https://github.com/N0NB GPG fingerprint: 82D6 4F6B 0E67 CD41 F689 BBA6 FB2C 5130 D55A 8819 ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
