On 10/3/2010 3:16 PM, 3830-request@contesting.com wrote:
> Where were all the mobiles?
The better question is, were all the counties covered by operations that
were workable from the world? Rare CA counties are VERY difficult to
cover with mobiles (some have no highways, many are remote from major
highways and major population centers, a dozen or so have virtually no
hams on HF), most take at least a day to get to from a population
center. There are NO hams in Alpine County, no ACTIVE hams in Del Norte,
Glenn, Tehama, and a dozen or so others. Teams of hams, mostly from CA
clubs around the Bay Area, LAX, and San Diego, fan out to do this. Most
of us choose to set up Field Day-like expeditions to put these counties
on the air, and most of these operations are on the air for the full 30
hour contest period! By contrast, while the guys in Texas did a great
job of mobiling through their 248 counties, if propagation or your own
operating schedule caused you to miss the 30 minutes that they spent in
most of those counties, you missed those counties.
San Francisco county is rare for the same reason the NLI and the City of
Chicago are rare -- the size of city lots, the cost of real estate, the
proliferation of RF noise combine to make it difficult to set up and
operate a decent station on the HF bands. K6SRZ, NI6T, and AD6E had
negotiated a contract to use a site within San Francisco County for this
year's operation, had a signed contract, had bought liability insurance,
came to set up, and were denied access to the site by the supervisor of
the person who had signed the contract. That's why SFRA was so hard to
find.
Our six-man team in Tehama County, all NCCC members, was in the middle
of nowhere, 20 miles off the interstate west of Red Bluff. We had two
tribanders on tower trailers, decent wire dipoles on 80 and 40, and an
S1 noise level, and generated more than 2,300 QSOs (roughly 60/40 CW).
Another large NCCC group lit up Alpine County. Take a look at Alpine on
a map -- there aren't many roads, it's pretty high in the mountains, and
it's very common to hit a lot of snow. Ditto for Del Norte, mountainous,
on the coast next to Oregon, no hams on HF at all. For years it's been
covered by a group from OR, but they got tired of the snow and cold WX,
so N6YEU was talked into driving up there from Healdsburg. Again, check
the map -- that's an all day drive too.
Bottom line -- don't lament not hearing mobiles, and be thankful that
there were fixed stations in every county, most of them operated by
active contesters, most of them with antennas capable of putting a
signal into the east coast on 80M, most of them full time operations. .
73, Jim K9YC
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