The prognosticators are predicting a pretty crummy weekend. Thunderstorms and rain both Saturday and Sunday. Not ideal weather for Field Day and being in close proximity to antennas.
Another club in our area is seriously considering calling off their whole effort, but SPARC is not. We treat this as a CERT activation for a real emergency, and under a real emergency you have to play with the cards you are dealt. If worse comes to worse, we'll just disconnect the antennas and wait for any cells to pass. One thing I will bring with me this year is my lightning detector. It can detect lightning strikes anywhere within a 20 mile range.
In 2015, Field Day was rainy and chilly. I swore up and down we were all going to come down with pneumonia, but we survived the weekend unscathed. A few years ago, Field Day was so windy, we thought our makeshift shelter was going to blow away. Back in the days of the Piscataway Amateur Radio Club, we had a particularly bad thunderstorm roll through on Field Day. We disconnected the antennas and sat around shooting the breeze, waiting for the storm to pass. During lulls in the conversation, we were hearing a faint "tic-tic" kind of noise. That's when we happened to look down at the coax lying on the shelter floor and saw faint blue arcs jumping between the center conductor and shield. This wasn't occurring as lightning was actually striking, but was happening when there was enough static electricity building up in the area.
We've been under a semi-drought the past weeks, to the point where lawns are beginning to turn brown, so the rain is welcome and is supposed to stretch into mid next week. So while the rain is most welcome, (It couldn't start AFTER Field Day?!?) we can deal with it, but if the Lord would provide us with decently dry, or not really pouring weather during set up and tear down, we'd be eternally grateful!
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!
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