Field Day Preparations

Was going to get started yesterday on Saturday, but I had a breakfast meeting with my club, and then I finished installing all the software on the PC I use to run my FlexRadio 5000A. The motherboard in that PC had been giving me random BSOD's, even from when it was new. It finally bit the dust early last week and wouldn't boot up at all. I ordered a new motherboard for it a couple of weeks ago, and installed it last Saturday. I left the Windows 7 installation alone, and while it worked OK, I just get all queasy inside running a new motherboard with the previous installation of Windoze. I think Windows has gotten much better in that respect, as I've done the same to to Vista installations, and after spending 20 minutes or so sorting itself out, they booted up and ran fine. Still, I prefer a clean installation when making a major hardware change.
SO......Spent some time cleaning up the garage this morning (ALWAYS a losing battle here at Casa de Radio!), and getting things rounded up (a.k.a. "One Big Pile") to make sure I have all the bits and pieces to put the portable satellite station back together.
The first thing I did after that was crank up my little Honda EU2000i generator, which hasn't been run in almost a year. I always put StaBil in the fuel, but it still took about 10 pulls to get it running, and it wasn't too happy at first. It took longer on the choke to keep running, and surged badly for about the first ten minutes of running. I ran it about 30 minutes with a 1000 Watt load, and shut it down to cool. Now it starts on the first pull, like a good little Honda should.
I really like this generator; it has an "Economy Mode" that conserves fuel, and with the light loading on it at Field Day, it will run a good 8~9 hours on one tank (1.1 gallons) of gas. Plus it's really quiet compared to some of the cheaper gensets on the market that use "lawnmower" engines. I've had people ask me if it was running, because the noise it makes was drowned out by the Coleman, Sears, and Harbor Freight generators!
Anyway.....back to work rounding up my stuff. I suppose if I did The Big Push I could get things running today, but I'd rather take the time to *make sure* all my gear is in good shape, and ready to go.
And I still haven't got the trailer licensed. That's on my To Do list for this week!

Amateur Radio "Field Day" In Two Weeks!

Being a hard-core Amateur Radio operator, one of the things I most look forward to is our annual "Field Day", which is always the last full weekend in June. This year it's the 27th and 28th. Field Day is supposed to be a 24 hour test of our emergency communications capabilities, so we go "off the grid", and set up to operate away from our usual home stations. It's an excellent drill, as we drag out stuff we've had put away since the last Field Day, set it all up out in the boonies, and try and make as many contacts with other stations as we can. My club, the United Radio Amateur Club is normally based out of the Los Angeles Maritime Museum in San Pedro. For the last 14 years or so, we've been operating Field Day from the Upper Reservation of Fort MacArthur. "Fort Mac" is a really cool place, having originally been a Coastal Artillery base, and then a training base for Army personnel who were headed overseas. it was also a Nike base in the 50's, and is on the list of National Historic Places.
Primary operation on Field Day is "HF", more commonly known as Shortwave, but we also operate some of the more esoteric modes, like digital communications, Slow Scan TV, and satellites. What's that you say? A bunch of AMATEURS have their own satellites? Yep, we hams have been in space since 1961, and actually had the first orbiting satellite capable of actively relaying radio messages, OSCAR-III. We beat the commercial guys by a couple of months, and some of them are still sore about it! How we hitched free rides into space when rockets were still of questionable reliability is quite a story. This link has the best history of Amateur Radio Satellites I've ever found, and is fascinating reading if you're a TechnoGeek like me. I'm the "Satellite Guy" in my club (it's what I do for a living), so I've been getting ready for my role at Field Day. I've spent all weekend (so far) getting my satellite antennas, Azimuth and Elevation positioners and the controller assembled and checked out. I haven't used my "Big Guns" in 4 years, so I had a lot of cobwebs to blow off, hardware to check, and software to update. The girlfriend's backyard isn't quite big enough to mount my full-sized Yagi's on the crossboom going through the elevation rotor, so I faked it with two pieces of mast standing in for the 2M and 70cm antennas. At least it lets me watch the "antennas" follow a satellite through the sky. This is the first time I've had full PC control of azimuth and elevation, and it's pretty neat to watch them "track" a bird going through the sky.
Sunday I'll get the radios and power supplies checked out, and then plug it all together and see how well my laptop controls pointing the antennas at a moving target, and compensating for the Doppler Shift on the downlink.
As we say in the radio biz, "Stay Tuned For More...."!