You end up on a lot of roofs. I was mentioning how we’d been up on top of Bradford House in Providence (It’s known I believe as Sister Dominica Manor) and on top of a college building putting up repeaters.
So we were asked if we’d like to see the setup on the roof. A picture was snagged of course I’m the 2nd from the right facing toward the church tower. The gentleman in the striped shirt he does the national weather service announcements you hear on 162.400MHz in these parts.
So this was my first Amateur Radio Field Day in years. I got there around 11AM and stayed until about 5:30PM. I couldn’t get there for the test session at 8AM though – I’m told there was only one person who took the test.
Here’s the setup:
That was the 6m band setup. I was somewhat chagrined that there was no CW work this time round. Perhaps next year I sort of prefer Morse Code for contest work. And a decent set of headphones. That’s a must for CW.
Got to be the person responsible for logging 20m band contacts. Then I got to work 40m phone. And being 40m requires a general or above – I was good with my extra class license.
I did get to show I was an amateur radio dinosaur though – and instructing in the fine art of noise reduction using the old Squelch control and then the Noise Reduction button on the Kenwood TS-2000. DSP noise reduction is interesting. I do like the radio though and may purchase on in the future.
And as is the case with lots of things, even with food being there we only got about a dozen or so people there today. Even got to experience drift in phonetics – with a Mike/Mario swap. Didn’t say anything though just chalk it up to personal flair I guess.
Got to see the rooftop setup for PEMA – all I can say is first they’ve got a decent set of antennas and the grounding system for lightning arresting is awesome.
Did see some old friends – there’s Brian K1PVD who I know from my years at the Attorney General’s office – he was doing IT for the RI State Police. Then Mike N1BEE .
So this morning I did a couple hours at the Emergency Operations Center alternate over the police/fire/commissioner HQ. It was interesting first I hadn’t realized how many cameras were all over the city.
Second there were fire, police, PEMA, and three amateur radio people there.
Devil of a time getting a Kenwood TS-2000 to change it’s tuning increment so we could monitor the fire departments frequencies. Apparently it needs the MARS mods to work properly.
Spewing Truth in the face of Lies 