There is not much to add after reading Ron's posting about Part 2 of this year's ARRL 10GHz Contest. Ron KO0Z spent the day on a hill top in Pere Marquette State Park above the river in Illinois while Harry WA0CNS and Herbert AF4JF drove I-70 west from Saint Louis to EM38 near Kingdom City (the only location outside EM48 that we have visited that day).
First of all, my travel companion Darcey was present. She is a true HAM radio dog. Maybe I should try to tech her CW some day:
How did we get the idea to put someone on the Eagle's Roost and have rest of the team driving the I-70 West as far as we can hear each other? That's simple - our numbers dwindled over the years. By saying that, I mean that there were more HAMs QRV on 10GHz in Saint Louis area just a few years ago. In addition to that, some of our colleagues whom we usually work on microwave bands during contests decided to go the the Great Lakes in the North to participate in the contest from there. We have tried several strategies for such situations before and ended up with this "leap frogging" and driving around concept. See also our other postings on this blog here and here.
Ron's position on a cliff above the river turned out to be excellent, we have made a QSO from every stop. Even better, we extended our trip way further out to the West than originally planned. It wasn't always easy to find a spot to set up without facing either corn field, a building or even a property owner curious about our activities (happened twice, means 20% of our locations).
Ron's posting shows some of our locations in fast food parking lots, behind restaurants etc. Following picture shows how we set up at a gas station:
There is another picture with me masking as a cellphone company worker behind one of their towers in a church parking lot (note the magnetic ARRL radio communications sign on my car):
Last picture to share today shows the side road next to I-70 in EM38 where we set up. The view is actually towards West (I was taking a picture of my dog, not of the view) but the other direction looked exactly the same. This was the same location we used years ago, described in another posting:
So, that's about it. We have spent a day with our precious hobby, got some sunburn again (believe it or not, there was some sunshine between the rains too) and found some locations to plan with for the contests to come.
73 Herbert
AF4JF
Great narrative Herbert. I enjoyed the photos of the operating sites. The picture of your Traverse and Harry's Minivan back to back with the dishes in between is a great idea! Thank you for the outing!
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