Can we please get back to the really important topic of captive rovers now??
Seriously, I wouldn't want to distract the participants of this Grid
Circling discussion..........
As one who has been on a hilltop when a certain Massachusetts portable
stations captive rovers arrived, I can speak from first hand experience
that this practice is neither proper, ethical or consistent with anyone's
goals (other than the station that reaps the benefits of their own captive
rovers efforts).
To make a long story short (without mentioning callsigns), I was on a hill
operating qrp with a couple of bands when captive rovers arrived. It was an
amazing experience. The skeds had already been made and the host station
was standing by on designated pre-arranged frequencies. I watched the
operation, in 10 minutes flat, they worked the host station up the bands
through 10 GHz. Each of the stations was bare minimum as the host station
knew exactly how much antenna and power the rover needed to make contact.
The 10 GHz station was a dipole in a coffee can with manual t-r switching
(had to move the antenna from the receiver to the transmitter by hand).
They were gone 3 minutes later.
They refused to work us, sorry..no time.....gotta go. So, we didn't even
get to work them on the bands we had from across the parking lot! No more
than 30 words were spoken by them during the entire visit, they almost
didn't have time to say they were amateur operators. If we hadn't
recognized the antennas, they wouldn't even have greeted us at all I suspect.
I'd be curious to know how many multipliers were made by that particular
station as the result of Q's with their various captive rovers. But,
alas..they aren't even required to list them separately.......so none of us
will ever know.
Hey, it's only a hobby.
Enjoy.
Art
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