06/26/2007 | W8ACW I want to start off by talking about an article I read in QST called "The club saver" it was about a lunch box 2m am rig for a Chicago club in the 50's. Thier attendance was down and most of the members had lost interest in the club activities. One of the hams came up with the idea about building this as a club project and to sum it up it was a huge success.

I needed something to spark the interest of the club members just as the fine folks in the article did 50+ years ago. I decided on field day, this was something that we could do that no matter how many showed up, we would have a good time. I proposed the idea at our club meeting back in December and to my suprise there was alot of interest.

We put together a field day committee and had updates at our monthly meetings. Everyone was interested and everyone participated in whatever way they could. People got on our repeater and discussed ideas (our repeater does not get the use it once did).

Fast forward to June 22nd and we were out at our field day site setting things up. We didn't have any big contest goals in mind, we just wanted to get together and have fun. I fired up the GOTA station that I brought out Friday night to make sure everything checked out and made a couple QSO's.

One of the QSO's was to a club out in Iowa, there were about ten hams out there and one of them asked me how many QSO's we were shooting for? I said I don't really know, I guess anything would be good. During our QSO, I started thinking about all of those big pile-ups and trying to get that rare one and I was so excited. We wrapped up our QSO and I shut down the rig and went to bed.

I don't think I slept but 2 hours, all I could do was think about the next day. Saturday came and we started everything up, and made some QSO's, ate some burgers, chatted with club members that came out. We had a ball, all in all we had over 25 people come out to our little field day. All of them are already talking about next year.

So thank you ARRL and thank you to QST who published a little article called "The Club Saver" that truly inspired our little club.

73 de Jeff -- K8KZB