2002 ARRL Field Day
07/23/2002 |
WO9K
WAL-MART IS HAM FRIENDLY!
Another field day approached and we still had no where to operate. All our leads were running out when my friends' son remembered seeing an advertisement about the department store in remote Morris, Illinois and suggested that we take the Super Wal-Mart up on their offer of "Free Camping". While I think that their policy is intended to attract the motor home crowd passing by on the local freeway we thought we would give them a try. We contacted the store manager ahead of time and got formal permission
to set up camp in the parking lot out front. He said there would likely be other "Campers" there, but not to worry. So we packed up the two cars and headed for Morris.
The spot that the store manager picked out for us was right underneath some power lines so we had to move further into the lot by a couple of rows. We decided to set up and make the best of our concrete and asphalt campground. Up went the trailer and the butternut vertical on one mast and the kb6kq 6m loop on another mast. We had to set up the generator almost underneath the side of the camper. Was it noisy! Later in the evening after the parking lot started to clean out we were able to move it about 25’ away. We found that parking a car between it and the camper made a lot of difference in the generator noise level. We’ll have to remember that one. Moving it away a bit also allowed us to use it as the end holder for our random length wire fed with 300-ohm TV line. This gave us a second HF station to operate when 6m was off. Although 6 did open a few times, that wire made a great 40/20 m antenna.
We could not have been in a much more public place. In these small country towns – Wal-Mart is the only big store, and it was open 24hours. Many people stopped by
and we gave the the run-down on our setup and a tour of the operating positions.
See the visitor log. This was not a ‘prime’ field day location but it was a unique one,
and turned out to be a lot of fun. It also gave us one of our best scores in years.
De -- WO9K
Another field day approached and we still had no where to operate. All our leads were running out when my friends' son remembered seeing an advertisement about the department store in remote Morris, Illinois and suggested that we take the Super Wal-Mart up on their offer of "Free Camping". While I think that their policy is intended to attract the motor home crowd passing by on the local freeway we thought we would give them a try. We contacted the store manager ahead of time and got formal permission
to set up camp in the parking lot out front. He said there would likely be other "Campers" there, but not to worry. So we packed up the two cars and headed for Morris.
The spot that the store manager picked out for us was right underneath some power lines so we had to move further into the lot by a couple of rows. We decided to set up and make the best of our concrete and asphalt campground. Up went the trailer and the butternut vertical on one mast and the kb6kq 6m loop on another mast. We had to set up the generator almost underneath the side of the camper. Was it noisy! Later in the evening after the parking lot started to clean out we were able to move it about 25’ away. We found that parking a car between it and the camper made a lot of difference in the generator noise level. We’ll have to remember that one. Moving it away a bit also allowed us to use it as the end holder for our random length wire fed with 300-ohm TV line. This gave us a second HF station to operate when 6m was off. Although 6 did open a few times, that wire made a great 40/20 m antenna.
We could not have been in a much more public place. In these small country towns – Wal-Mart is the only big store, and it was open 24hours. Many people stopped by
and we gave the the run-down on our setup and a tour of the operating positions.
See the visitor log. This was not a ‘prime’ field day location but it was a unique one,
and turned out to be a lot of fun. It also gave us one of our best scores in years.
De -- WO9K
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wo9k fd @ Wal-Mart
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wo9k fd @ Wal-Mart
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