HF Packing on July 18, 2004

I was in the Dallas area for business, so I came a few days early and hung out with Marcus, KR5N.

In the morning we decided to go to Lake Ray Roberts to do some HF packing.
So we packed a bunch of stuff into the back of Marcus's truck:



Funny things is, with all the stuff that you see, it is mostly Radio Stuff!
The left half of the picture was my stuff, the right half is Marcus's stuff.

Between the both of us we had 2 water bottles and a power bar... so we had to stop by a place to get food!

If you look at the back window, you can see a reflection of me taking the picture.

So we stopped off to get some lunch to bring with us:



Here is an up close picture of the truck... ooh, look at the nice antennas!
4 antenna in all! 
I only have 2 antennas on my van :(



On the way there,  we were monitoring HF-Pack 17 mtrs (18.1575 MHz) and Joe, W5SAN was on the air Bicycle mobile.  He was in Celina, Texas; it was a bit out of the way on our drive toward Lake Ray Roberts but since we were having fun we decided to meet up with him and have an eyeball!

Here is a picture of Joe with his bicycle in front of Marcus's Truck :



Here is an up-close shot of Joe's BM station... pretty slick!


One cool thing was that I talked to Joe about a year ago when he was Bicycle Mobile when I was operating from my Home QTH.

When we got to Lake Ray Roberts, we found a nice place under a tree.  If you look closely, you can see Marcus under the tree on the right.


I set-up my station within a few minutes, it consisted of :

My antenna was a 33' piece of wire thrown up in a tree.
Why 33', because is 5/8 on 17 meters and 1/4 on 40 meters (conterpoise required on 40).
  It also loads up on 20 and 30 meters with a tuner



Here is a view from the side:
The person you see operating is Marcus!



Below is a picture of Marcus, he had :



Below is a picture of me in front of my station :


I made a few contacts, it was fun.
I made a CW contact to Chicago, IL.
I talked to Joe, W5SAN again he was listening for us. He could barely hear me on 5 Watts, so having the amp was real nice.
I also talked to W3FF in CA, he heard me great with 5 Watts! He was listening for us too.

I went hiking, Marcus and I range tested the 2 mtrs and FRS; I had a GPS so I knew how far apart we were.
With the FRS we went about 0.6 miles
With 2 meters, we went about 2 miles.

During all this I got to see a bunny rabbit, the rabbit is in the center of the picture.


Here is the bunny up close.
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