"Dee D. Flint" wrote in message ...
"N2EY" wrote in message
...
In article , Mike Coslo
writes:

No, just a kind of passive resistance thing. I seriously do not agree
with
the person who is our field day planner and club vicepresident. I am
not
the only one boycotting the club field day either.... It has been
chosen
solely by him to be placed at one of the high schools out in the county
(as
opposed to the city) where there is little traffic on the weekends
(passing
by the school that is).


Perhaps he/she couldn't get permission to set up anywhere else. Although if
that was the case, they should have communicated better.

Getting a site has become more difficult around here, mostly because
of development. Running generators all night requires some room. What
were once open fields are now McMansions. There's also the liability
issues.

In the '80s, radio club I belonged to did FD at what used to be a Nike
missile radar site. Off Delchester Road and West Chester Pike. Lots of
ready-made ham antenna structures and shelter. All gone now.

Good times.

To me FD is mainly can you actually get a GOOD station or
stations set up at a location that has no existing facilities? Everything
else is a secondary function of FD.

Yep. What constitutes a "good" station varies all over the place.

As I said above, for me it's all about getting a good station setup and then
verifying (through the contest portion) that it is indeed a good station.
Now we do some other things too. For example, we have people assigned to do
advance promotional work (publicity), people assigned to handle food, etc.
But without stations, there's no FD.

"Without stations, there's no FD." That's a keeper quote!

[big snip]

Under most real emergency circumstances, some emergency personell is
going to tell you to go to a certain place, and operate a certain
transciever. You won't set up a tent or put together a station or
anything.

Maybe or maybe not. Depending on how much the local EC knows about hams and
their abilities, he/she may just say set up stations that will cover area X.
It would be more common that the EC talks to the leader of the ham group and
then puts that ham in charge of communications.

And it all depends what kind of comms are needed. In some cases, the
need is strictly local. In others, it may be long-distance.

Also to me it is to see what can you do with the resources available to you
or your group. Small groups for example may not have a lot of resources.
In past years, our club set up, from scratch, 3 towers of 50 feet each with
beams in about two hours plus some wire antennas and ran 4A. This year, due
to illness of several members and the possible poor turn out due to last
year's poor band conditions, we put up one tower with beam and a couple of
loops and ran 2A. It worked out very well despite the fact that some of us
had our reservations about it (me for one).

One thing that I've seen way too much of are the groups who try to do
too much with too little. Somebody gets a bug in their ear to do 5A,
and it doesn't matter to them that the site isn't big enough for 3A,
or that there won't be enough ops to keep 5 rigs on the air full
time. Or even most of the time.

Here's another possible scenario. You are in a county with a low population
perhaps you are the only ham in the county and there is no emergency
coordinator. A disaster has smashed everything flat including your home and
YOU and only YOU are even a possible source of communications. It will be
up to you to salvage the equipment from the rubble and get it set up and on
the air. Don't say this scenario can't happen because it or something
similar has happened.

All sorts of variations. Maybe your area is untouched except that the
power is off and land communications out. Or maybe a critical bridge
is washed away.

Remember the San Franscisco earthquake of some years back, when that
upper roadway section of the Bay Bridge partially fell? It took a
bunch of telco cable with it. Very little long-distance capacity was
left, and most of that was needed for emergency comms. So hams handled
a lot of health-and-welfare traffic. Which doesn't sound like a big
deal unless you have a loved one there and haven't heard from them in
a few days, and the TV news shows their neighborhood on fire or the
multilevel freeway they use twice a day has collapsed....

Point is: You can't duplicate real emergencies that ham radio would be
involved in. Who would have expected the WTC to be attacked and their
subsequent collapse?

Exactly. Or that a shuttle would burn up on reentry and scatter itself
over thousands of square miles?

As amateurs, our FD exercise (to me) is to learn what we can and cannot do
as individuals and as a group.

Yep. And to expand our skills.

Actually it is probably good to try something a little different each year.
Next year I and the OM may choose to try a FD by ourselves NOT because we
don't want to participate with the club but just to do something different
and see how well we can do without the larger resources available through
the club.

Good advice. I've done big groups, medium groups, small groups and
singlehanded. All kinds of sites, too. Lots of fun. Don't think I've
missed one since 1968.

364 days till the next one...

73 de Jim, N2EY