"Let me guess: the club is formed around a 2 meter repeater and on Field
Day, one guy brings and operates HF while the rest sit around, drink beer
and eat hot dogs."
This sure sounds better than the old days. I started Field Day while in
high school, and ended up with the grunt jobs. One year, they had the
bright idea of installing a rhombic, headed east. I was volunteered to
build the open wire feedline, stringing the wire through dowling that I
drilled and boiled in parafin. Then, I was volunteered to install the damn
thing. It was about 300 feet on a leg. By Field Day, it was all installed
and ready to go. Fired it up and it was pathetic. I mentioned to the gurus
that those big termination resistors were wirewound and would not work, but
they were all engineers at Tektronix, knew everything, and I was a dumb kid.
They did not listen. Our tri-band beam up 20 feet worked better. The
rhombic was retired and the feedline I worked for days on disappeared.
They were always amazed, however, when I made more contacts with the Morrow
mobile twins and a tri-band beam than they did with their big Collins rigs -
but it was partly because they built new gizmos just before Field Day every
year and they never worked.
Then there was the year that they took the Collins 75A-1 out of the trunk
and sat it on a large log. It rolled off, face down into the mud. The rig
was fine, but they lost a few hours cleaning the mud off while I was working
stations on 10 meters am.
Nope, sure not like the old Field Days. I think I would have liked sitting
around drinking beer and eating hot dogs.
73, Colin K7FM
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