THE SITE VISIT
"Where Is It exactly ???"
"Not sure, Chirk at a guess - I reckon there would be signposts.."
And there you have it - Myself, Steve (STE) and Adrian, all sitting round at a club meeting, wondering where on earth the location for the event is....Ian finally gave us a rough idea. But there was just under 2 weeks before the off, time was seriously ticking......
Between the 3 of us we'd decided to do a site visit, have a look round, and work out a few things - I am no dab hand at antennas, and I consider that if I ever gave a talk on the subject, I could easily offend most of the club in one hit.....In a word....I know almost nothing.....I know the basics, but the finer technicalities of antenna design are a total mystery to me, Maybe it was because during my novice course I'd had a bad day at work, then gone and done the antennas part of the course - not sure....
We decided on a Thursday night visit to the site - all we knew was it was in Chirk....Chirk is only a few miles down the road from Wrexham itself, so we figured it couldn't be all that far - Plus we were looking for a hangar - surely that in Chirk itself would stick out a mile...We'd planned the visit well, but unfortunately Stephen couldn't make it, he was otherwise busy - Myself and Adrian found the site - we didn't know how to get into it properly - but we parked up in the lay-by and peered over the fence.
In front of us was a massive field - It had flat bits, bumps and a generally varied terrain - Adrian's face lit up - "We could put some very big antennas up here" he grinned...I didn't know what he was planning - We entered the field and had a look around - We then proceeded to do some measuring, and some thinking..I wasn't going to Elvaston on that weekend, but Adrian and Stephen were - So I simply told each of them to look out for the other, and to have a good chat about the antenna systems.....
Over the next couple of weeks we would meet up on the air almost daily and discuss plans, Adrian spent a lot of time talking to my voicemail, this just happened to be due to things like me leaving my phone over the other side of the house!
In the course of the next fortnight - all 3 of us would meet on air and discuss ideas/plans - Had we considered different designs for the antenna setup ? - were we having problems with getting hold of equipment or parts? - What about the site organisers - were they aware of how big our antennas were ? - Having contacted Me and Mrs Pierce, they had no problems with our antenna plans, but I did point out to them that if were going to encroach with anything they were using the field for, to please let us know. They had no issues, and our antenna system that could make Daventry look like a crummy bit of wire attached between two poles - was becoming more of a reality.
During the last few weeks, and even into the last week itself, more plans for the antenna system, we'd decided to go for inverted v-beams, a setup which could be turned into other setups - this we discovered when we got to the site, as there were a lot of trees around, that we could make use of. Sometimes I thought whether a simple dipole wouldn't do! - However, as I had been handed the baton for this race, I was going to make sure we did well, our surroundings couldn't be as much of a problem as Llangollen was (Apologies to all those in Llangollen - VHF was a total waste of time !) - I decided that as antennas were an area I knoew nothing about - I left everything to the experts - and as I would discover - I'd made the right choice.
Job done - as far as I was concerned - We'd got an antenna setup sorted, plans were in place - Site Visit completed, all we had to do was go and get on the site, and get up and running!