[NLRS] Roverpack wow

[jcplatt1 at mmm.com]

hmmmmm, this will certainly fuel our discussions regarding the second
weekend, huh.

My family issue remained stable for the entire weekend so I was able to
hang out with the fixed group for the full time on both Saturday and
Sunday.    First, let me say that I had a great time ..... from my
perspective I thought it was a huge success.     My observations:

*  Conditions right at the start on Saturday morning were poor, signals
were very weak.   That, along with start up issue, led to some early
confusion.   Once we established that the rovers were to call and that
there was a fixed order, things smoothed out considerably, even with poor
conditions.     Lesson learned - determine who is lead caller (in this case
the rovers) and who is available in what order (fixed side).
*  Although I have not looked at it myself, I understand that distances
varied from about 160 to 245 km or so.   Even with poor conditions, these
are doable distances with 1 - 2 watts and 19" dishes (+/-).   N0NAS/R's
200mW made the grade on most contacts .... a few of those long ones during
poor conditions were at the threshold.
*  Tony and Dave grill a mean dog.
*  We were constantly running stat's on the rover group .... time between
contacts, time to next stop, etc.    Although they would change pilot cars,
we were able to predict when we should expect them in the next stop with
pretty fair accuracy.    That allowed us to start to listen and to beacon.
The agreed upon even/odd one minute beacon sequence worked well.   Also
knowing if the rover pack was headed north/south/east/west helped us
predict how far to move our dishes from the previous stop in order to be on
heading for their new stop.
*  Its hard to gauge, but Buck Hill may be a bit better RF location than
Lonsdale.    However, Saturday morning conditions were just darn tough
while on Sunday morning we enjoyed significant local enhancement due to a
small high pressure cell parked overhead .... our first contacts on Sunday
morning were on FM with 20 dB over S9 signals at 200km .... nice.
*  There were a few times when the fixed group was getting big .... I think
I counted 14 op's at one point.     I thought about going to two freqs like
we had done last year.    However, the op's were all in gear by this time
and we were running through the Q's pretty good.    Maybe when we get
really good we can think about this as a back-up option for future work.
*  Having one fixed site working one rover pack really optimized the QSO
(and point) rate.    Did it optimize the fun rate ..... I think everyone
has to answer that question themselves.    However, I'm really happy that
some of the fixed op's did travel some distance to be there.     I can tell
you that at the fixed sites, we did not have a lot of down time, and when
we did, we had a great mini-hamfest !

Overall, I think we are starting to get to be a pretty seasoned group.
Think about it ..... we had 10 to 14 fixed op's working 6 rovers at over
200 km where the rovers at their peak were making two stops per hour.    We
would not have been capable of this type of operation even just a few years
ago.

September .... hmmmmm.

73, Jon
W0ZQ