[FLWSS] Recent Chatter!

[n2cei at downeastmicrowave.com]

First of All, John, K2STO, Did you make it out on Sunday? Looked for you all day. Hope everything is OK!
THEN!!! All the chatter about location and pointing antennae, and which system to use, yada, yada, yada, ---- Is making me Sick!!
Why don't you guys just get your stuff on the air and get out and try to use it!! Bringing your stuff to a picnic and working each other in the parking lot is fine for figuring out frequency problems. But after that, you got to spread your wings a bit!! Running out to the site where WA2IID/R is operating or across the water from where K0VXM lives, is just fooling your selves. If your dish had a lobe or there was a "Tree" in the way, how would you know?? Those of you guys that do take the gear out are playing with signals so large that any data learned or recovered is almost useless. 30 years ago when I started to fool with this uWave crap, I failed horibally! Not only was I discouraged because there wasn't anyone around that wanted to play, the gear and the test gear that I had wasn't even half as good as it is today. But you know what! we made contacts. We had oscillators that would drift 200-300 kHz. We had feeds that had more return loss than forward gain. We had battery s that weighed a ton and lasted maybe an hour. We had analog dials on our IF rigs. And what was a keyer?? Home made tripods if a tripod at all and the rigs!! It would take two guys to lift my first rig into the trunk of my car!! But we made contacts!!!!! We went out and did it and kept doing it to get where we are today without all of this "technology" that appears to be keeping most of you guys off the air!!! 
The point of this blurb is not to piss people off. It to try to help you all to realize that if you all sit around talking about it, you will never gain the experience required to attempt to use the "technology" thats is available today. You don't need to be within 100 hz to make a contact. You don't need to figure out how many places past the decimal you need for the correct heading. All you need is the desire to make contacts, one at a time. 
OK! yes the technology is cool! Its fun to use, and it could help!! BUT---- Hard facts as they are, I don't even look at a Topo map for a 10 ghz contact under 100 miles!! How many of you are working 100 miles on 10Ghz?? Well you want to know something ? If you put a 10 Ghz system together, 1 watt, 2 foot dish, If you can't work 100 miles something is wrong!! And if something is wrong, you can't figures it out siting behind a Internet terminal "Chatting" it up about what programs to use for locating and aiming. You need to be out in the feild "Doing" and not talking.
Look guys, its like this. If you all truly want to do this, we can. Its not hard!! guys are doing it every day all over the world!! I got to admit, I'm spoiled! I go out on a 10 Ghz cume contest day and work 30-40 stations in 12-15 grids back in NJ. We, K1WHS, also work 60-80 contact and 25 grids in the sept contest every year!! Its not magic! Its not hard! But the stations we work simply have the experiance because they went out one day and failed. 
So, I'm here to help if you want it. The meeting in Orlando is coming up. Who s bringing their 10 Ghz gear? 
Steve, N2CEI 



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://flwss.net/pipermail/flwss_flwss.net/attachments/20080122/04e11b36/attachment.html