[HCRA] Field Day the HCRA Way - Cancelled for 2020

[Rich]

Alan,

The $100 dollar QSO sounds like a great plan. I’m all about multi-sport days. My wife and I are alpine rock and ice climbers. Adding radio to the mix has been a fun addition. It’s gotten us to climb some pretty obscure Routes. Particularly in the backcountry if western North America. While
Not very obscure, we were the first to activate The Grand Teton and Devils Tower, both technical summits of which no one ever activated under the SOTA contest which surprised me, especially The Grand.

Flying together sounds great. Until then, developing and tweaking systems would be a good idea. Banner towers have a great STC for a tailhook which would be perfect for keeping the wire from interfering with flight control surfaces.

A few year back we escaped some bad weather in the eastern Sierra and attended pacific con ham fest. Made an aeronautical mobile contact with a skydiver...while in free fall and under the canopy!!! Pretty awesome!!!! We were SOTA from Mt Diablo just outside SanFrancisco. Road out bikes to the top to meet human power requirement just in time to make the contact! Pretty awesome combination of operating under ideal atmospheric conditions. Even better Mt Diablo was socked-in yet it was a VFR day.

What do you have for pilot ratings? Aircraft owner? We currently live In a Wilbraham. 

-Rich

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 11, 2020, at 10:13, Alan Dove <alan.dove at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Rich:
> 
> It's great to hear from another pilot in the group, and I love the
> photo. 
> 
> I don't think there was any way to render a group Field Day operation
> safe this year, even outdoors. Doing individual operations from our
> homes is actually a pretty good exercise for disasters where sheltering
> in place is the best strategy - including this pandemic. 
> 
> I'm very interested in aeronautical mobile operation in general. Maybe
> in a year or so, when we're all vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, we can
> go flying together and figure out some techniques. HF would be a
> challenge, but perhaps a trailing wire antenna deployed out the window
> would be fun to try. And VHF from several thousand feet should be a
> hoot. 
> 
> For a few years I've also been pondering a wacky idea that would
> involve flying to different airports around New England and setting up
> portable operations, either for the New England QSO Party or Field Day.
> Sort of a "$100 QSO" excuse to fly, really. Let me know if you're
> interested and I'll describe what I have in mind.
> 
> -- 
>          --Alan (AB1XW)
> 
> Alan Dove, Ph.D.
> alan at alandove.com
> Skype: alandove
> 917.273.0544
>