[Elecraft] OT: Field Day anecdotes

[Chris]

Many years ago a couple friends and I got city permission to hold a 
Field Day in a city park in Albuquerque.

We had a large fluorescent pink awning (from a life raft) over our 
picnic table, and wire dipoles on guyed poles. It made for great PR, as 
the eye-catching color was obvious, and the local newspaper covered the 
story in the Sunday edition.

The problem arose around 1 AM when the automated sprinklers came on - 
the large volume, long-stream slowly rotating our way! We made some 
quick guesses about the location of the controls, and dashing over we 
found the control box was unlocked, and were able to turn off that 
night's watering schedule. Whew! The other guys were dropping the awning 
over the table of radios as the sprinklers shut down. Then we resumed 
operation till noon.

It seemed like such a good setup, but we overlooked that one item. All 
the gear was saved.

73,

Chris, K0PF


On 5/21/2026 10:09 AM, David Cutter via Elecraft wrote:
> We stepped out of our tiny caravan one morning to find we were axle deep in
> water.
>
> David G3UNA
>
> On Thu, 21 May 2026 at 16:49, Michael Needham via Elecraft <
> elecraft at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
>
>> Many years ago I got permission from my National Guard commander to take
>> one of our shop rigs and generator sets to FD .I set up  the generators and
>> a rigged up interface  the NG had built to supply civilian plug-ins  , now
>> mind you we in the past had small generators vs the two 10 Kw generator set
>> I just showed up with.
>> It was fun to see my club members discover that there was enough power to
>> run all the stations plus air-conditioned  custom van , plus lights .
>> So Saturday afternoon  som of my friends walked up while I was making a
>> generator  swap over which involved having both generators operating and a
>> heavy duty snap action change over switch that swapps the load over.
>>   My friends  were staring at the control panel and expressed  concern that
>> the clubs equipment was too much load  for the generator  , I had to laugh
>> as I pointed out they was looking at the Cycles Per Second  gage not the
>> load meter , we were holding at 60 CPS  and 10 to 15% load , where when my
>> unit was in the field we ran these generators at 100% load for the
>> duration  of the drill.
>> It was a conversation with would pop up many times later about "That time
>> we had more power than we knew what to do with".
>>
>>              Michael  WB7SKK
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:54 AM jimk8mr--- via Elecraft <
>> elecraft at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
>>
>>>   Many years ago I was operating after dark, from a table under a picnic
>>> fly. When suddenly my pretty new IC-746 jumped off the operating table,
>>> onto the ground!
>>> A departing operator had caught the feedline on his car's rear bumper.
>>> Fortunately I had an SWR bridge in line, the coax to it acting as a
>>> mechanical fuse to keep the radio from going any further.  The op did
>>> realize what had happened and stopped to check things out, so my radio
>>> would not have accumulated may miles. But it still worked!
>>>
>>> 73  -  Jim   K8MR
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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-- 
“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!”
― Hilaire Belloc