[ct-user] Field Day Setup Help?

[Bob Mandeville]

Hi George,
At my club, we set it up the way you specified - one laptop per band - if you are
not networking (we don't).  Our policy is that whichever station is set up for a
band/bands stays there, software-wise.  This means that another of your stations
should not switch to, say 10M once another of your stations has already done
that.  The big thing is Dupe-checking.  How would your second station know which
calls your first station has already worked?

It can be done - don't get me wrong.  But, it means that you have to collect the
logs from all the stations and merge them, then re-distribute them to all the
stations.  And, all logging would have to stop while you are doing this... or the
stations would have to use paper logs, then transcribe these back into his CT log
(with corrected times).  This is, at the least, a headache.  At worst, it could
lead to a real mess if the merging doesn't go as well, or you make the slightest
mistake.

Two other tips would be to make sure that each station has AUTOSAVE turned on,
and that you periodically put a fresh disk into each PC, say every 4-6 hours.
This way, if someone's hard drive crashes, you haven't lost everything, just part
of it.  This happened to me two years ago, on my own PC.

Whichever PC will receive the final files (for merging) should have a virus
detector attached.  I only found one virus, but that was enough.

And, have your Field Day file set up well before hand.  You will have enough
headaches on FD morning getting each station configured for its particular radio,
and other hardware.

It's fun, and we do it.  I just thought you might be interested in finding out
what experience has shown us.




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