May 3, 2008 – Special Olympics Spring Games
Actually, despite the perception you might get from this photo, Bob W2IK was not up to monkey business during the Special Olympics Area 20 Spring Games held May 3rd at Harlendale’s Memorial Stadium in south San Antonio. Bob set up his self-contained EmComm station on battery power, plus an inverted 40 meters dipole. While there were at least 4 pop-up awnings destroyed by the high winds that morning (winds gusting to over 30+ mph), Bob wisely had used metal stakes to secure the legs of his awning, plus used a pair of bungee cords to secure the top cover to prevent the wind from lifting it off.
Bob checked into the Navy Mars HF net before the start of Special Olympics, then allowed Schuylar KE5VIP to borrow his station while he explored the nearby facilities and looked for refreshments. This event is about the fifth time in a row that Bob has offered to help with this event, using K5BCR club call for Hill Country REACT as the special event call. Operators making contact could send SASE to the REACT Team’s PO Box address for a certificate to be mailed to them.
Click here for more photos from this event.
Here is what Bob reported following the conclusion of this annual event…
As a warm up for the N5D operation (to be held May 16-17), this Saturday (May 3rd) from 10am-2pm local, I operated using the call sign K5BCR, on behalf of Hill Country REACT during the Special Olympics Texas Area 20 Games which took place at Harlandale Stadium on the south west side of San Antonio.The event took place on a sunny, but very windy day. I had planned to use an “inverted V” mounted on a 31 foot orange telescoping fiberglass pole, but not having the area for “tie downs” to prevent it swaying in the strong gusts, which over turned several industrial strength steel framed canopies, I switched to my old reliable steel telescoping mast which I lashed to an 8 foot chain-link fence that ran along the “Olympic Village” area where I was going to operate. It never budged. (Always be prepared for the unexpected…. in this case winds that gusted to over 40 mph!) My ez-up canopy went up quickly and I did two very important things..
- First: I have my universal jump-team staking kit which has in it 4 different types of stakes for matching to the best soil/ground conditions (In this case, an old parking area that had some sort of hard base but my sharpened steel spikes did a great job of holding down the lift force of my canopy)
- Second: I used two bungee cords connected together that prevented the canopy material top from taking flight. (learned this from a lighthouse special events operation I did in the 90’s at Fire Island when a squall with 60+mph winds almost put us off the air for good!)
After the operating area was completed with tables and chairs, I did a quick station setup using my MARS Ecom station which is a self-contained station/tuner/speakers/rigs/power supply/clock all permanently mounted in a large transit case. Hooking up to a deep cycle marine battery and connecting the coax from the “inverted V” had me on the air in a minute.
My first contact to test the system out was checking into a Navy MARS net ‘”around” 60 meters with my signal getting good copy all over that net’s region: AZ,NM,TX,OK,AR,LA. Band conditions were fair in the morning on 40 meters, with me making contacts as far as Colorado, with 5/9+ replies and in to many other states.
After several hours, however, the band conditions on both 40 and 20 took a nose dive and contacts became few and far between. Very few signals were even heard on any band. I did manage to also give out points in the “7-Land QSO Party” by contacting stations on 20 meters. Band conditions played an open/closed game for most of the day.
As per planned operations, I closed down at 2pm local after making a modest amount of QSOs and did a reverse cycle to pack up the station. Lee Besing, N5NTG, who was handling local communications for the Special Olympics, took some pix of this special events operations. As always, by taking more than what you need, and pre-planning for contingencies, helped make this another smooth operation regardless of propagation factors. (The one thing you can’t adapt to a great extent is cranky propagation.)
Next weekend (May 10th) ….. MARS/HAM Crossband operation with my same basic setup in the field at a location north of San Antonio.Bob W2IK – NNN0KSI – NNN0GBY2
