A amateur group in the Swiss city of Zug, which is rather interesting
... is, mmh, somewhat difficult.
Here's the story of a German ham moving to a little town in Central Switzerland:
To be honest, I never have been very active in Germany. But after living in "Kanton" Uri for a while I was looking
for some ham activity.
The local people of the USKA - Union of Swiss Shortwave Amateurs (see link below)
seem not to meet very often, perhaps not at all. In February 2000 I asked one OM, that
happens to be the father of a colleague, to introduce to me the other hams on the next meeting, and he
said "Yes, ok, but it may take a while". I've never been on any meeting in Uri since this time...
being to busy (or too lazy) to make the drive to the next city Luzern and participate in their meetings.
There are some UHF/VHF repeater in the area, but partly hard to reach without directed antennas,
the village where I used to live in Uri being surrounded by high mountains (see my picture page).
And as my flat was in the basement and cables difficult and some yagis on the roof would need a rotor and
more cables and a extra pole and so on... no, too much stress.
So I thought forget about UHF/VHF here, better do shortwave and install a little FD4 antenna.
I asked my landlord for the possibility to fix one end of it on his house. Due to the small
layout of the estate the other end should best be fixed on a rope going to some other house or one of the surrounding flag poles (flag poles are quite common in Switzerland it seems). The landlord was a nice guy,
and he would not only allow to install the FD4, but even did set a short wooden pole to help raise the balun some
extra metres. I was happy and asked the prefered neighbour, if I perhaps may fix my rope to his flag pole. He said yes, and I was even more happy. After two weeks I had the antenna, 50m of cable and some rope, and
approached the neighbour to install it to his flag pole. But his wife suddenly told me that "the children do
fear a possible lightning strike to the antenna", and generally she and her husband do not like
the idea any more, in fact...
Ok, there are other neighbours, I thought. But I asked the other three people that were
owning the surrounding houses, and none of them did allow anything like a rope tied to his house:
"It does not look pretty!" "The wind will damage my house" "No, forget it!"
And that's why I hadn't any antenna there in Uri.
Meanwhile I relocated to some other place in Switzerland, in the northern part. Not as much mountains any more. We will see, perhaps sometimes
in the future there will be something possible here.
To be continued.
A amateur group in the Swiss city of Zug, which is rather interesting
Homepage of USKA - Union of Swiss Shortwave Amateurs
Homepage of German Amateur Radio Club
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