Lessons from Ham Camp #19

Last weekend the MS Coast Amateur Radio Association held another of our camp-outs, this time at the Big Biloxi area off of Hwy 49, just north of Gulfport.  Good stuff... but there was some rain, some heavy fog, a whole lot of damp, and then the sun came out – just in time for the drive home!  This was somewhat challenging in a tent, but it was still a lot of fun.

Then for the Tuesday night net (see What We Do on 2m, from a couple of years back) it was my turn to run things, so for the tech topic I threw out the question: What did you learn at Ham Camp #19?  Briefly, here are some replies:

• Waterproof your tent!  Well duh.  But I'm very glad I did this two years ago.
• The current solar/ionospheric conditions stink on ice!  Some of us made contacts, some none.
• The Yaesu FT-857D has a built-in speech processor!  With all those menus, who knew?  Works great!
• No solar power!  With weather like that, those of us who put out panels were averaging about 5 watts.
• A W3EDP-mini antenna, only 21' tall, tunes great on 80m & 160m if you have a 30'+ counterpoise/ground wire at the tuner.  Made some contacts on 80m too, but 160m was sparse.
• End-fed antennas, of any design, rock!  Especially for camping.  Easy up, easy contacts, easy down.

There were also a many other minor successes along the way:

• Using chirp, got one of the other ham's FT-857D programmed up for the local repeaters and the common set of  VHF/UHF simplex channels.  Short work!  BTW, if you want some how-to notes, here's a previous post covering it.
• Another ham hooked up a local UHF-to-VHF repeater, so that the other campers could easily reach the Biloxi VHF repeater from a UHF handheld.
• Lots of new battery testing, even though there was barely any solar to feed it.  We were all averaging a horrendous 2 amp-hours per contact, but there was still plenty of power to go around.
• A crystal radio (this one) sort of worked, but at 20 miles from a bunch of coffee pot stations, there really wasn't enough power coming in to get the earpiece output up above campground noise.  Next time, will bring a high-impedence amplified speaker.  Even so, it was kinda cool.
• The food was outstanding.  Straight-from-Chicago hot dogs, grilled beef and asparagus roll-ups, grilled shrimp, and (of course and as always) Spam and egg breakfasts.  Remember kids, if you go off and forget the butter at home, fry the Spam first and you'll have plenty of grease to float the eggs.

And that's about it.  Still packing things back down, but should have that all sorted this weekend.  A good time was had by all, and there was some relatively painless learning involved; those are all that matters.  Oh yeah, no injuries, not even tiny RF burns.  That matters too.