[MAMS] Central States VHF conference

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson]

Strictly speaking the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa is 
not a race. Its just a full week bike outing with about 15,000 
participants from pre teens to the occasional octogenarian. Lance 
Armstrong may participate. Basically its a 7 day bicycle extended party. 
Towns and individuals along the way set up lemonade, water, and food 
stands and there are floating bars with lots of drinks. The only benefit 
from early arrival at the end of the day is a better pick of a camping 
spot. Most of the camp gear travels in the support vehicles, no town or 
city can house that many in established hotels/motels/ and private 
bedrooms. But most towns chosen plan on making a mint for that passage 
in refreshments sold. One or two counties have ordinances that don't 
allow passage of such a bicycle mob because they have lost lawsuits over 
road cracks that wrecked bicycles and riders. There are web pages 
dedicated to RAGBRAI that search engines easily find.

Looks like in the road atlas that the least interesting but fastest 
route for you will be I74 to Davenport, I80 to Iowa City, and I380 to 
Cedar Rapids. The conference hotel in in the southern part of the town 
that they call the SW. Probably because its the south part west of the 
Cedar River that runs diagonally through town. US 30 to Clinton is a lot 
more interesting drive but RAGBRAI is going to Clinton on Saturday and 
that will make that road a mess of traffic.

I worked in Cedar Rapids for 13 months in 1963-64.

I have a DTN dish with their 11 GHz feed converted to coax and tuned for 
10368. Its a 30" dish, probably awkward for roving, but I'd like to 
check its performance. I have ideas for a lower system gain feed to make 
it easier to aim, but may not get around to building that feed this week 
as I finish up my presentations. We are having problems with loading a 
video and getting it to be found after moving the files to another 
computer. And right now I have 5 .ppt for 6 papers that might be handier 
to be all in one.

I need to get busy with a 10 GHz PA for 10G+ this year. The eyes aren't 
roaring ready for SMT though. Maybe I'll get a SoftRock assembled to 
practice at surface mount today. Or maybe I could borrow or buy a PA but 
so far there's been no response to my feeler put out on NLRS and MW.

73, Jerry, K0CQ

On 7/22/2012 11:25 AM, Zack Widup wrote:
> Thanks for the tips on driving. I've never been to Cedar Rapids
> before. I heard some talk about the bicycle race but didn't know the
> details.
>
> I had my 10 GHz antenna tested at the conference in St. Louis a couple
> years ago but I'm curious about my 24 GHz antenna and the little Yagi
> I use for portable operation on 144 MHz. I don't know if I'll bother
> with any preamps for testing. I'm curious about the WD5AGO/W5LUA
> preamp I have been using on 902 MHz but I have to tear the transverter
> all apart to get it out of the transverter. I might bring my rather
> ugly but functional 24 GHz transverter for the homebrew display.
>
> 73, Zack W9SZ
>
>
>