Our little radio club here never seems to amaze me. We seem to run in fits and starts, and right now we're on an upswing of activity and excitement. It's great to see a club that's actively trying to do things.
Next month the club is putting a special event station on the air. This will be our second year doing so at a local festival. We had a great time last year, so we'll do it again this year.
I've secured the 1×1 callsign and put the notices out for it. At our recent meeting we hammered out the details, though a lot of it was left undone in my book.
I prefer having things better planned, though I admit I'm not a great planner. We didn't really plan it this year in a lot of detail, but we'll get everything done no doubt.
One of the biggest and unusual kinks was a last minute suggestion — or demand, really — that one of the two HF stations be PSK. Well, that's fine, but it's mighty late to add that. Yeah, you can run it but none of the guys who are going to be looking for us will be doing so on PSK.
The goal of going to two HF stations was to operate on at least 20 and 40 meter phone, as most special event contacts are by phone. No one in the club — at least not the hams who proposed it — are PSK gurus. In fact, I'm not sure either have more than a couple of PSK contacts under their belts anyway.
We're doing the special event to showcase ham radio to the public, and I don't know that PSK is that impressive to the passersby at a festival. My gut reaction is that the guy with the Wifi laptop doing VOIP is probably going to be more impressive than watching keyboard-to-keyboard PSK contacts.
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One of the OTs who came to the meeting (his first in 18 months) assumed we would be using laptops for logging. That discussion moved to Field Day, and someone said that using paper dupe sheets did great on FD. I couldn't let that slide by because the dupe sheets were a freaking disaster! About half of the people writing on the sheets either didn't know how to use them or wrote illegibly. The dupe sheets sucked, pure and simple — or maybe the instructions on how to use them weren't plain enough. People complained during FD about using them anyway.
For the special event, paper logging will be just fine since we don't have to worry about dupes. It's just a matter of logging their call the best we can. Only the stations who send for a card get one anyway, but I always check the log on those anyway.
My concern with the PSK operation is that the inexperienced hams piddling with the PSK will wind up keeping us off 20 meter phone. Two stations on the same band in close proximity will be a problem. If 20 meters is the best band open, I would suggest using phone there to at least get some contacts. Of course that's just me.
We have quite a few members but only a few active members with any contest/special event experience. Its still a fun time, since we're all learning anyway. For someone who wants to really knock down some contacts, it can be frustrating watching an op who can't get his hands around the pileup. It's a learning situation for all involved, hi hi.
That's all for this installment. I have some new keys to write about later … 73!