I'm sorry that some have a bad view of roving as a non technical activity. I
believe the guys who entered in west Texas and worked each other only add
fuel to those feelings.
For the most part our rovers in the Northwest have very good equipment and
technical skills. One of us had a dc to 10 GHz station running out of a vw
bus.
It was not pretty but it was functional. He had a tower he raised and
eventually moved on to through the roof masts. He began to feel cramped and
bought
a 35 foot bus. Now he can run a soup kitchen in there if he wants.
I was comparing notes with a long operator of portable stations here. The one
advantage a fixed station has over a rover is that they pick up the
stragglers where I might not hear them and only get a smaller percentage of
them.
These operators who do that show dedication to listening to their gear instead
of
drinking beer and eating chilly which is OK. Its like hunting some guys do it
for social reasons not the elk meat.
Anyway, my score is 1/4 the score of such an operator and in the same contest
I may have contributed 5-10% to his score by making several qsos from 12+
grids. My goal now would be to dig out more qsos like this guy did.
The technical skill I demonstrated there is that I built a station that could
talk to this station on the bottom 4 bands no matter where I went. It also
has to do with his set up as well.
This guys station was good, so he may not have needed me for grids, but there
are a lot of guys who did use me as their only contact to out of the way
grids. Everyone wins when I change a grid therefore its not arbitrary.
What I did was a technical achievement. A police vehicle could not go and
operate back to civilization without repeaters where I operated. IN some cases
a
repeater or a chain of repeaters wouldn't help.
The e-skip stations who sent me cards when I was in DN04 (population 1 cow
and a family of jack rabbits) will have an unusual grid in their collection
that
they will not see as arbitrary.
Finally how UN-technical or arbitrary is it to work cn92- to EL07 on 2 meters
e-skip from your car. How UN-technical is it to keep 10 beams on your car and
go 80mph down the highway.
It may not be too technical, but its as hard as building a station at home
and there are many more issues to deal with than at home. It is certainly more
difficult to operate than at home, I will leave out portable here because
mother nature can be a big pain in the butt.
Now if it was to be really technical we would all start of with a radio kit
and a pile of aluminum rod at the beginning of contest and see how many qsos we
had by Sunday evening. I would lose.
Also rovers are over 10% of the logs submitted. I bet its nearly 100% of
those roving submit logs because of the effort involved. And this 10% can be
quite noisy and may overall be as much more than 10% of the score of fixed
stations.
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