{"id":1189,"date":"2015-05-30T21:23:20","date_gmt":"2015-05-30T21:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/?p=1189"},"modified":"2015-06-02T21:18:19","modified_gmt":"2015-06-02T21:18:19","slug":"field-weekend-part-1-arrival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/?p=1189","title":{"rendered":"Field weekend (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TSGARC<\/a>The Thornbury and South Gloucestershire Amateur Radio Club (TSGARC) held its first ever field weekend over the late May 2015 bank holiday weekend. \u00a0This post is\u00a0the first of three\u00a0that describes what happened,\u00a0what went well, not so well and thoughts for the next time….<\/p>\n

Although the event was to take place over the Saturday, Sunday and Monday it was clear\u00a0from early planning that additional time would be\u00a0needed\u00a0to establish then\u00a0remove\u00a0the camp, equipment and clear the site. \u00a0Early planning also\u00a0identified two key items essential to the success of the weekend: large, dry tents and toilet facilities. \u00a0Fortunately the club, via\u00a0John, had access to several 6m x 4m tents and had sufficient funds to hire a chemical toilet from Abbey Loos<\/a> of Gloucester.<\/p>\n

Another key feature of the event was a barbecue would be held on the Sunday afternoon assuming it was permitted by the notorious and traditionally wet bank holiday weekend weather. \u00a0As it turned out, fortune smiled and the weather remained dry.<\/p>\n

So, early planning done, 10\u00a0members arrived on the Friday morning at 10AM and work started to erect the 2\u00a0large tents. \u00a0One was to be the radio\/operating tent, the other cooking\/hospitality etc. \u00a0This two-tent idea was conceived so\u00a0that noise and conversations could be kept to a minimum in the radio tent to\u00a0provide a quiet environment for the operators. \u00a0The 2 tents were erected in a non-overlapping \u00a0‘L’ shape with the apex towards the South West. \u00a0The intention was that this would provide a space, sheltered from the wind, in which the BBQ could be held and a space, in the outside corner, for the 12m trailer tower. \u00a0This configuration proved successful.<\/p>\n

\"TSGARC<\/a>With ample hands the erection of the tents proved a quick and easy job. \u00a0Attention then turned to getting the stove connected, for that much needed cuppa, and moving the trailer tower to its chosen position. \u00a0Around this time someone\u00a0noticed that the pin which\u00a0secured the\u00a0winch drum to\u00a0its assembly was missing rendering the winch unusable. \u00a0Show during transit this pin had come loose and fallen out. \u00a0The unusable winch would have been a\u00a0disaster had we been in a remote location, however, the land owner was able to provide a suitably sized bolt which saved the day. \u00a0A quick phone call later and John (M0HFH) had the necessary information to machine another pin which he installed the following day. We were lucky John was at work and had the time to make a replacement. \u00a0Thanks John.<\/p>\n

The second key item, the chemical toilet, arrived around lunchtime which was excellent timing and just when it was needed \ud83d\ude09 \u00a0Compared to the loos I’ve experienced before, at music festivals such as Glastonbury, it was spotless – a real palace! \u00a0The only negative was that it didn’t have any loo roll – the holder was empty… \u00a0Fortunately, \u00a0loo roll was one of the items early planning had identified and thus we had a good supply – happy camping and second disaster avoided \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

As it turned out the most time consuming task during setup\u00a0was the elevation of the trailer tower. \u00a0This was not expected\u00a0and occupied pretty much the whole of the afternoon, completing\u00a0just in time for the clubs VHF net at 20:00hrs. \u00a0One of the first renovation jobs the club on the trailer tower was to replace all winch cables as they were in poor condition. \u00a0In doing this job someone had the bright idea to replace the old cables with string so that when it came to installing the new cables they could be installed quickly and correctly. \u00a0This was a great idea, but it was predicated on the assumption that the old cables were correctly installed! \u00a0\"TSGARC<\/a>As it happened they weren’t and we thus spent hours re-routing the new steel cables so they did not catch or rub unduly on the lattice members. \u00a0It was just as well that we had a generous helping of tools, spanners etc as this could have been the next disaster! \u00a0Anyhow, all turned out well and we got the TSGARC Yaesu G-600RC<\/a> rotor installed and a 9 element Yagi (Part No. 220089) from Tonna<\/a> for the 2m band installed on the top. \u00a0Tower raised, the antenna was at about 13m above ground. \u00a0With about 30 minutes to spare we were setup and ready for the clubs VHF net.<\/p>\n

Using a highly directive antenna\u00a0for a net is not ideal but on this occasion the majority of members who normally take part where in the field. \u00a0The remainder, were fortunately, located along\u00a0roughly the same beam heading \ud83d\ude42 \u00a0Excellent signal reports were obtained from all\u00a0stations. Actually, that was\u00a0as no\u00a0surprise as 50w into an antenna with 13dBi gain at 13m above ground is going to work well! \u00a0The antenna was also deliberately attached to the tower to be vertically polarised thus aligning with the convention that VHF, FM activity is vertically polarised.<\/p>\n

At this point its worth mentioning an issue we had with the rotor. \u00a0Just prior to the weekend Paul (M0ZMB) had reconditioned the clubs rotor, installing new multi-core cable and some nice weather resistant plugs. \u00a0Unfortunately, the length\u00a0of cable from the rotor to the first plug was less than the height of the tower and this meant the cable could not be placed in the towers cable cleats without snagging. \u00a0So instead the cable was left to run free by the side of the tower moving about slightly in the light breeze. \u00a0On one occasion when raising the tower no one spotted that the plug had become snagged by a lattice cross member. \u00a0The resulting load ripped the cable from the plug and shattered the connector. \u00a0The electrical connections were easy to repair but it was clear that a new, longer length of cable was needed that\u00a0could be run through the cleats without snagging and thus an emergency shopping trip was needed the following day \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

And that was pretty much the first day – setup day.<\/p>\n

Andrew<\/em>
\nG0RVM<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Thornbury and South Gloucestershire Amateur Radio Club (TSGARC) held its first ever field weekend over the late May 2015 bank holiday weekend. \u00a0This post is\u00a0the first of three\u00a0that describes what happened,\u00a0what went well, not so well and thoughts for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[9,39,27,13,12],"class_list":["post-1189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-antenna","tag-portable","tag-tsgarc","tag-uhf","tag-vhf"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1189"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1301,"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions\/1301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tsgarc.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}