[K3PZN-List] FD Afterglow

[Curt Milton]

The club's participants should be enjoying the afterglow of a highly positive experience.  Yes we (I) did a whole bunch of things wrong - but we excelled in safety, cuisine, manpower (of two genders) and enthusiasm.  
 
Thanks to Mike N3VOP for stepping forward to lead field day, as FD may not have happened without his spark.  
 
Thanks to all who brought gear -- Ray&Kerri easily brought the most pounds of stuff - opening their 'second home' to us and hosting 2 of the stations within its walls, and providing unparalleled hospitality.  Pete brought his state-of-art rig for many ops to enjoy, and 4 other rigs & sufficient antennas were provided by other participants.  
 
A courteous young man named William brought equipment and material to make coffee Sunday morning, and saw to it that it was made.  
 
Enthusiastic new hams participated fully in set-up, operation and tear-down.  We experienced no man-power shortages in set-up nor tear-down -- I was positively amazed at our presence during tear down.  
 
Useful spectrum was scarce!  20 and 40 m was loaded with SSB signals.  With 2 kHz spacing, 20m supports only 200/2 = 100 signals -- one could easily find at least 5 times that many in tuning across the band.  Literally short distance E-skip QSO's were taking place (dominating the frequency for their sporadic path) while coast-to-coast QSO's were happening simultaneously.  40m was similarly loaded, while the rest of HF was dreadfully sparse.  when I was on 15m, we had scarce propagation working coast-to-coast but not much in-between except for sporadic E that was weaker than 20m.  
 
We had more scouts than expected and the club's ops patiently got them each onto the air to make at least one contact.  They also participated in raising a mast.  
 
Andy took the weekend off of IT so our stations were not well-integrated into N1MM -- but of course that is too much like the work-week, so Andy morphed into an excellent chef (understatement here) as well as procured all the material that was consumed with great enjoyment.  
 
Fellowship with other ops was also excellent.  In a lighter moment during tear-down I noticed the 'dean' of Carroll County's radio amateurs (polite way of saying advanced in years and sucessful experience) Wayne N3UN hanging around with sunglasses and a straw hat (but no feather), so I had to accuse him of being Richard Petty (except Wayne certainly is much less frail in appearance) -- and Wayne recounted his extensive experience with building and racing cars (before he got into ham radio).  
 
Its always a problem getting everyone enough radio time, hence our decision to set up the 4th rig.  I'll personally contact a couple ops who I feel we did not get to a rig sufficiently, discovered only after the fact.  Certainly I'll prepare a list of operational miscues but let's defer that for now.  
 
The FD message (copied by an SSB crew this year) certainly conveyed this event is not about the score only, and at least we excelled here.  Hopefully the enthusiasm carries over into other pursuits inside and outside ham radio.  
 
73 Curt