[tcrc-fd] Field Day 2013

[John P. Toscano]

I assume that we are still on for the meeting at Caribou Coffee tonight, 
Tuesday 06/11/13, to discuss Field Day preparations. Is that right?

I am looking at a map of Burnsville to locate the new park where we will 
be setting up this year. I am still not quite sure where we will be 
located in the park. I was told that the VHF station will be located in 
the parking lot since that is the highest point that is easily 
accessible. Is that the park entrance from County Road 11 to Acorn 
Circle or Great Oaks Drive, in the southwest corner of the park? Or are 
we talking about the northeast corner of the park close to Burnsville 
Parkway? It appears that Parc Drive or a southern extension of Kennelly 
Road (which looks like gravel from the satellite image I have) are the 
park entrances in that corner. But the NE corner seems to have a 
slightly lower elevation than the SW corner, at least according to 
Delorme Topo NA 9.

Either corner of the park looks to be pretty heavily wooded, so not 
necessarily the best for VHF.

Is QuadPodZilla an option for this year? I may need to get the antennas 
up higher than the roof of my car to get past the trees. Although Quad 
Pod is not a WHOLE lot higher than the car roof, it might help a little.

I wish we could count on enough help with setup and teardown to use a 
real tower for the VHF station for a change...

Anyway, I plan to come out to coffee tonight, and hope to find some of 
you there. I don't seem to be able to get into the 147.21 repeater at 
the moment, even though I did remember to add in the 100 Hz PL tone on 
transmit. Both of my HT's have dead batteries that won't take a charge, 
my FT-5100 has a cracked LCD so I don't know what it is tuned to, and 
though I can hear the repeater with either my IC-706MkII or my FT-847, 
neither radio seems to open the squelch on the repeater when I transmit 
my callsign into it... May be an antenna problem on the vertical, and 
too much cross-polarization loss on the horizontal antenna that got a 
workout over the weekend and seemed to be performing well on SSB.

73 de W0JT