SEPT 2000 VHF CONTEST

Bill said he'd meet me up on the mountain around noon on Saturday. The Blue Knob repeater was not working and he was exasperated trying to contact me. I had camped in the State Park. It has a western exposure and Bill was coming in from the east. He was two hours behind our informal schedule mostly due to kind of being lost. I was just about to give up on Bill and go it alone, when there was his trusty Saturn filled with every variety of PVC known to man (antenna masts and other inventions). Bill met me with the news, "I got lost. And oh, I forgot my microphone". He had worked all week on a set-up for his ICOM 706 - all nailed to a beautiful board. But, now it was just antenna switch pop art. So we were down one radio.

Went to the top of the mountain. We thought we'd see a gigantic multi-op setup because the ranger said that someone had asked permission to use the mountaintop for radio. We talked about asking to join them. There was nobody, absolutely nobody there. As we were setting up our antennas, a car pulled up with radio-looking people in it. We went over to snoop - they were DX FM broadcast hunters. Hurray! They had asked permission from the ranger. Aha! The mountaintop was ours. We promised not to point the 2M beam at them. (That explains why we have no grid squares to the west - or at least that's our excuse.)

I immediately got out my lawn chair so I could sit and direct Bill's hard labor. Unfortunately, I had grabbed the chair that was supposed to go to the dump. As I was sitting, it crumpled into a flat mat. So we have one radio and one chair. Poetic isn't it?

I fired up the laptop. It actually booted (sometimes it doesn't). We were counting on this spiffy freeware, logging program. The screen was absolutely black in the sunlight. The only hope of using it was to put a coat over your head and the laptop in the 90-degree sun…. Bill brought out the trusty composition notebook and a pen and we were off. We had agreed to use Bill's call since it's a 1x2. I started working on 6 meters and forgot all about that. Bill said, "I guess we're using your call"… Bill was putting up another mast for 2 meters while I was getting my first exhilarating taste of VHFing in the boonies. We were a rare delicacy for the VHF sharks. A rice crispy grid square at 3124 feet according to my just bought for the occasion GPS (a Garmin eTrex which actually reads out in Maidenhead GRID SQUARES!).

The two meter beam was up and we had the 440 quagi on a camera tripod. Bill took a shot at operating on 2M and each contact was a new grid multiplier. It did not dawn on me that we were working Massachusetts (FN23) from Blue Knob (FN00). They were weak, but very copyable.

Time passed like a flash. It was getting dark. I was very hungry. The mountain had won our affection forever. We is now VHFers.

73 from N3WP - Bill and WA3RQD - Jim