Nate, Nice stories! You gotta love those creative phonetics...
73, Henry - K4 Too Much Coffee On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 11:23 PM Nate Bargmann via Elecraft < [email protected]> wrote: > FD wouldn't be fun without challenges. > > I've always operated with in a club setting. That in itself is a > challenge but meeting that challenge will assist in developing > interpersonal skills! > > As to the things I remember. One of the first FDs I operated we were > working Saturday evening and heard "CQ this is ??BE--Beer Everywhere". > We got a good laugh from that. One year the ops were puzzled as aiming > the tribander (TA-33) east resulted in a lot of west coast stations and > vice versa. After staring at the antenna for a bit I came to the > conclusion that the reflector and director were reversed on the boom. > Some years ago we used the same antenna and it was marked wrong. This > time a quick search of the Web brought up the manual and the owner was > convinced of the marking error. The antenna worked as expected. > > Weather is always a factor on the central plains. One year can be > blazing hot such as 1993 with the Enid ARC (Oklahoma) when I think it > was something like 113 that Saturday afternoon. I drank water all > afternoon and never sweated or went to the latrine. Promptly at 1PM on > Sunday we tore down in record time and I left the gear in the truck > until around sundown when the temp got down to the high 90s or so. > > The next year the temps were more reasonable and operations were going > well. As we settled in for the overnight run we got word over the > repeater of a storm front that was moving down from south central > Kansas. The park pavilion we were using had no sides, only a roof. > After an hour or so it became apparent we were in the direct path of the > storm. I suppose we considered a few options but settled on putting the > gear--radios and computers--on the picnic tables, sitting amongst the > piles of gear with blankets and sleeping backs with our backs to the > incoming storm. It was an impressive sight watching the rain blow > horizontally through the pavilion! The one-lung generator never missed > a beat and kept our lights on through the storm. No gear nor ops were > lost. Seems we should have gotten bonus points for that one! > > Once the storm cleared the first thing to put back in operation was the > coffee pot. Priorities. > > 73, Nate, N0NB > > -- > "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all > possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." > Web: https://www.n0nb.us > Projects: https://github.com/N0NB > GPG fingerprint: 82D6 4F6B 0E67 CD41 F689 BBA6 FB2C 5130 D55A 8819 > > ______________________________________________________________ > Elecraft mailing list > Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft > Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm > Post: mailto:[email protected] > > This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net > Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html > Message delivered to [email protected] > ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
