[PVRCNC] Thursday December 12 meeting

[Pete Soper]

Attendees: K2AV, K3KO, K4QPL, N2NFG, N3NPQ, N4TL, AD4L
Regrets: WW4M (SO's needs trump club meetings)

I arrived in time to catch the tail end (that is, the last 45 minutes) of a
heated technical discussion between K2AV and K3KO about where RF current flows
when the coax is run inside a tower leg or some such. I was too involved with 
the waiter trying to get a decent beer to hear the conclusion about where the 
current really flows but perhaps Guy and Brian will be submitting an article to
"QST" to get this down for posterity.

About the beer. After going around the houses I established that the beer
selection at this Applebees looks like this:

 - Killians

There were two or three industrial and light industrial solvents for sale too
but I won't mention them. So on the beer score I give this meeting location a
3 on a scale of 100. Still, the Killians was better than a pine cone in the
eye and of course all the friendly faces made this a minor point.

They had a superb mixed appetizer plate with yummy ribs, breaded cheese
sticks, some kind of "cheese inside pastry" that was quite good, and chips and
dip with hot peppers. My shrimp platter was also good and overall I rate the
place 70 on a scale of 100 for food.

The room was about the right size for a well attended meeting of 18-20 but we 
would probably share it with other patrons if we just had say half that
may folks coming or maybe not if the manager is on straight salary or it is
a quiet night. There was only one patron sharing the place with us so it may 
be that for Thursdays this is a non-issue (the manager could shed more light on
this). 

I don't recall if there were real doors for the room so it could be closed off.
The noise level coming in from the rest of the restaurant was just on the verge
of being a problem but the noise going the other way for something like a 
Carnac description of the N4AF exploding balun might constitute the bigger 
concern if there are no doors (somebody else will remember this detail I'm
sure).

No problem with separate checks. The service was satisfactory. Getting too/from
the place was trivial. Traffic was heavy but moved at a decent pace. On a rainy
night coming up from south Cary would be painful though, as the beltline 
drivers seem to go nuts with more than 5 drops coming down. I'd probably go
counter-clockwise in the beltline in the hopes of lighter traffic in this
case (but is it really lighter these days? I don't make that trip enough to
know.)

We mostly yacked about the storm and also got the scoop on N2NFG's 
unfortunate house fire (Bob's having a new home built now). Lots of storm war
stories, the best one being the tree that massacred K4QPL's wife's car coming 
down more or less where Jim had been standing a short while before and forcing
him to stop and think about mortality. 

N3NPQ and I couldn't resist a little shop talk about the sorry state of 
interprocess locking primitives on Linux and how /dev/futex holds a lot of 
promise. 'Nuff said :-)

Others can fill in the blanks, that's all from me for now. See yous guys next
year.

DE AD4L