Field day in South Florida Was very unusual this year... It DID NOT
rain!!
I spent time with the Palm Beach ARC which is very fortunate to have
BellSouth support. They had two portable 100 ft crank up towers, one
portable 86 ft crank up (all Tri-Ex) used for emergancy cell sites in
the case of a hurricane. In addition, had two 70 ft COWs (portable cell
sites with generators and air conditioned rooms along with the pneumatic
masts.
SIX (count-em!) air conditioned operating locations. The 20 Meter CW
combined with 20 & 15 Meter RTTY location was a full size luxury bus
turned land cruiser complete with air conditioning, beds and even
electrically operated window curtains. Any country rock star on the
road would be proud to live in this one.
We operated 4A low Power with 4 tribanders at various heights and had a
full sized lazy H for 40 (4 half waves in phase at 33 and 100 feet) plus
a two element delta loop for 40 (the other station on 40 cw)
Our score is estimated to be in the 11,000 point range. I don't have
the logs, but here is the RTTY scoop:
Call: W4HAW 4A SFL Low power.
Band QSO's Sec DX
20 85 38 6
15 5 4 0
I suggest that next year the digital/RTTY QSO's count 3 points each to
encourage more participation. Most of my Q's were with 1D at home.
I was glad to be able to show some people what RTTY was all about, but
would have been happier had the rate been higher to show what can be
done on RTTY in a contest.
The FD ops need to realize that if they got on RTTY more, they could
work all the ones that they had in the log on SSB and CW all over again
on each band. Too bad. We only went to RTTY when the rates got slow.
Hope all had a great time.
73, Pete N8PR
PS: It poured about 30 mins after we got the last antenna/tower down!
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