Amateur Radio From Loudoun County VA

NOTE: Next Meeting is July 19, 8:30 at the El Rancho Plus

Notes from Our June Meeting

Since this meeting was only one week before the 1997 Field Day weekend, most of our time at the June LARG meeting centered around our plans and last minute organizational arrangements. It must have been time well spent because, as you will read below, all of the participants have declared this year’s Field Day a resounding success! Paul, K4MSG, took a few minutes to fill us in on some more interesting Vibroplex / “Bug” history and showed off one of his latest acquisitions, a WW II Brunnel bug, which he had resurrected after purchasing at the Manassas Hamfest.

July Meeting - Come and Help the Club

LARG needs your help. The officers need some fresh ideas for activities, programs, or interesting diversions to have at our monthly meetings. We thought that the July meeting would be a good time to toss around some ideas and see what we can come up with that will interest our club for the next few months. So put on your thinking caps and come to the next meeting with some good ideas. Also, Temp, W4HZV, has volunteered to bring in an example of what may be the oldest 2-meter HT around!

Field Day at Ida Lee as K4LRG

Well, our final score has yet to be tallied as this Newsletter is being written, but a first cut through the logs seems to show that our score is down somewhat from last year. Whatever the outcome, those of us who took part in Field Day this year are unanimous in stating that a good time was had by all! It’s amazing how much can get done when everyone pitches in and works together. One thing is for sure, the weather couldn’t have been better.

This year’s Field Day was especially well-attended with 20 LARG amateurs participating. It’s difficult to believe that this was our fourth year setting up at Ida Lee Park. You would think that we have everything all worked out, but we are still experimenting with our antennas and station setups. This year’s featured attraction was Tom’s, WB3AKD, military shelter mounted on the back of his pickup truck for one of the HF stations, which used our biggest antenna to date: a 500’ long wire!

Activities started Friday afternoon with an antenna erection crew on hand to put up a total of three masts, one tower, a 2-element tribander, three wire antennas, and an 11-element 2-meter yagi. And did it all before dark! We were inspired to get our work down promptly because Temp’s wife Karen, and Paul’s wife Sandra, provided the antenna crew with a delicious picnic supper.

Our Friday efforts meant that we could have a more leisurely start on Saturday morning. By 10:00 things were beginning to take shape. We had John’s, W4AU, TenTec Corsair II at its usual front porch station connected to K4MSG’s trap dipole and W4AU’s 2-element beam on the top of W4HZV’s mast.. Chris’s KK4??, IC-735 was in the shed using the club’s full-sized G5RV antenna, and the third HF station was another IC-735 in the shelter on the back of WB3AKD’s truck. We even had time to do some last minute pruning and splicing on the trap dipole to move it from the phone to CW portions of 80 and 40 meters. The fine weather allowed us to set up the 2-meter station under the big oak tree. Gary’s, NC4S, 5 contacts quintupled the club’s old 2-meter CW record for Field Day.

Our power was provided by Larry’s, W8LM, generator, which he trusted to the club’s care while he attended a graduation elsewhere. It worked flawlessly for the whole weekend. You can send in the warranty card now, Larry!

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