In article , "Kim"
writes:

I sure do wish we could have seen this thread stay alive without all the
trash that got wrapped up in it!

Would you like another story, Kim?

Here's one....

Back in 1968, age 14, I went on Field Day for the first time. Back then 6 meter
AM was big in this area - lots of hams had 6 meter mobile rigs as well as home
setups.

That FD, I wound up at the 6 meter AM (yes, on 'phone) setup late at night. The
rig was a Lafayette HA-460 - 10 watts of AM with tunable receiver and
transmitter. (While it was all in one box, it had separate dials for the
receiver and transmitter frequency). Antenna was a 5 element Yagi at about 50
feet.

Fortunately my voice had changed enough by then that I never got "The WA3 YL
station, please repeat....."

Now some might decry such a setup as "primitive", but we worked close to 200
stations with it - and we weren't serious contest operators at all. Nor was the
club a serious contest outfit; it was just some folks who put on a half-serious
FD with whatever came to hand.

With the beam and the conditions, we got as far north as Massachusetts, as far
south as Maryland and as far west as Ohio. Lots and LOTs of EPA, SNJ, NNJ, and
DE stations. Never a real band opening, though, or we'd have been all over the
country.

The big challenge was those stations which were on SSB. In those days there
were few amateur VHF SSB stations, but those few counted for points just the
same. The HA-460 had no BFO, so the SSB was garbled as heck. But if you turned
on the transmitter "spot" switch and adjusted the transmitter frequency dial
*very* carefully, you could make some sense of an SSB signal if the other op
repeated enough times. We pulled at least a dozen SSB-to-AM QSOs that way.

Stayed up all night (for the first time!) and operated while the grownups
snoozed in their cars or went home. Got home about 3 Sunday afternoon, hot and
tired, having had a great FD. That was also the first time I uttered the
contester's immortal words: "Wait till *next* year!"

I still remember the call - WA3CCP, the old "ARTICS" radio club. (Yes, I know
the right spelling is "arctic" but they spelled the club name differently.
Stood for Amateur Radio Technical Inter-County Society).

36 years and 36 FDs later, it's still great fun.

73 de Jim, N2EY