Quick video from FCARC Field Day at the Cowboy Church
Yesterday I was at the Cowboy Church in Bonham to join the Fannin County Amateur Radio Club members for their Field Day activities. I was there wearing my Red River Valley Amateur Radio Club shirt and took lots of notes and pictures.
We had previously been invited to join them as a “joint” club FD, but Club President Mark Johnson (W5PTX) opted to meet several of our members at Cooper Lake State Park and operate with the Special Event call sign W5W. I went and joined FCARC to see how they do things and see if they did anything better, more fun or whatever, and report back.
Notwithstanding someone having told me they did it from an air conditioned space, it too is 100% outside. Ugh. It is under a cover for a small outdoor building, with a giant commercial smoker so, I guess it functions as an outdoor staging area for BBQ activities at the church. Anyway, it is all outside.
The good news is there is a big upslope on the west which magnifies the prevailing wind. It was solidly blowing all day and I honestly never even broke a sweat. Well, not much. It was much more habitable than the Love Civic Center Pavilion in years gone by. But, I remain convinced that in spite of the Yankees in CT deciding that FD should occur after the gates of hell have opened in TX; if we apply ourselves we can find some place with AC that we can operate out of.
I did a quick video and shot a bunch of pictures and took a lot of notes. They had HF stations set up. Their club has two pretty slick trailers. The blue one was a State of Texas lighting trailer for illuminating work sites. Pretty cool. They promptly got two of the stations up and running. The third, belonging to James Hunt (KI5DQ) who did our tower climbing at Atlas; he had some sort of equipment failure on site. At home it had tested fine, but he had some sort of harmonic feeding back into his gear which he finally concluded was going to keep him from doing CW. :-(
RRVARC member Cliff Leath (KI5OPP) had joined me there mid-morning and we broke for lunch at a place called Mudbones in Bonham. If you haven’t ever been there, it was my first time trying it…wow! It was phenomenal. I had driven by it for years, the name wasn’t very appetizing so I hadn’t given it any thought, but then I was provided an online review which sold me on trying it. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. Be prepared to wait. You walk in and order, everything is ala carte so don’t forget to tell them if you want fries or onion rings, then you grab a table. It took us 20-25 minutes to get our burgers, but the wait was worth it.
Kathy made two lemon pies and sent them with me. The little building had a refrigerator/freezer so the pies stayed cold until we broke them out at about 1500. I played wingman for RRVARC member Leo Salas (N5JEP) who had been there since before I arrived and when I left at 1730 we had collectively made 75 contacts. Most were domestic, but we did have one in Canada. The FCARC group was super hospitable and I had a nice time operating with them. And one thing I picked up was that Mark Johnson was in an air conditioned cabin all day. LOL
73
Phillip Beall (W5EBC)
Photos from the Day
Click any image to enlarge (Lightbox gallery).
