In my travels from North Carolina to Maryland and back, I have five hours of driving each way where I listen to podcasts and other Ham Radio outlets. While listening, I hear ideas that might be fun to incorporate into BARC activities. There have been several ideas that have surfaced that I would love to hear the membership comment: about whether or not these are good ideas to add to the club. The goal is to enjoy Ham Radio more and obviously create more activity within the club.
Believe it or not, it is 5 months to FIELD DAY!!! Time to plan! I was listening to the Ham Radio Workbench podcast where they interviewed the person responsible for organizing one of the largest FD events in the country. He belongs to a club in California with 23 radio stations! His method of organizing the event is impressive. They took the entire camp of 5 tents with towers and multiple antennas down in 3 hours when Field Day ended. There are lessons to be learned to make it efficient and fun. No one wants to spend hours and hours putting up and taking it down no matter how big or small FD is. Also he has a handle on preventing cross band interference that is simple and effective.
Have a listen to the podcast. They always start with a segment of “what is on your workbench” first so you could scroll through that part to get to the interview, at 1:24:28 or listen to it all (2:34:32, yes it is 2 1/2 hours long!). Also look at the “show notes” where there are links to other information and videos.
http://workbench.libsyn.com/hrwb-247-setting-up-a-large-scale-field-day-with-keith-elliott-w6kme
One of the thoughts I heard on Ham Radio 2.0 was having a “Saturday Simplex” event at 8 PM every Saturday night. That way people could get on the radio and see how many other people they could contact that evening. They even had a suggestion that if people sent in logs of their contacts, one would be randomly picked for a prize of some kind. Part of the reason for doing this is to not only understand how to do simplex operations, how far we could communicate with it but also as an emergency exercise in case the repeaters go down. Everybody think about this and please add comments at the end of this blog so that we can collect your ideas and figure out what we want to do. There are more ideas below.
Have a listen here on the podcast starting at 13:29:
https://www.youtube.com/live/9dnYwHDLaA4?si=Q8N_wv9QuGv0fAtX&t=809
I love that Beth and others have supported the Saturday breakfasts (the Saturday after our BARC meeting, see the meeting web page for details). I have enjoyed the camaraderie and the discussions as well as the food! We should make it a point of going.
https://w4amc.com/next-meeting/
We should have weekly POTA outings at local parks, how about CW practice on the repeaters? etc….(more to come)
Please send your ideas as comments to this post below and I will get them. Lets make this hobby MAX FUN!
73 Peter, N4PVH
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Thanks Peter
We all need to put our heads together and figure out what we wanna get out of the club and order these activities. The more we start doing things, will soon figure out what works, and what doesn’t work. The more activity, however, the more excitement, and the more engagement from the membership. It’s time to get things going again after the Covid “depression“. We gotta get out there! Thanks for reading it. 73 Peter.