We are in the midst of a Special Event that caught my eye. For people
who think hams are too serious or have no sense of humor, I give you National
Sasquatch Awareness Day.
As you can see this is a week-long special event, and working various combinations and numbers of special stations listed in that first paragraph gets you a BIGFOOT Certificate! (Suitable for framing, I'm sure). This is a screen grab from station W7B's page on QRZ.com.
While that Special Event Station screen capture follows the "click-it to embig-it" rules of thumb, this version gets Even Bigger when you click it:
The desire to collect certificates for special events or other contacts that are out-of-the ordinary in some way is almost universal in ham radio. Pretty much every day, and especially on weekends, two of the most popular things to do are go to a nearby park or the top of a nearby hill and operate Parks On The Air (POTA) or Summits On The Air (SOTA). The person going to ("activating") the park or hilltop gets their own points, and the people contacting ("working") those stations get a different credit. Each and every one of those pieces of what's generally referred to as wallpaper is valuable only to the people who collect them.
Oh, that's imaginative.
ReplyDeleteWe need Y7ETI for those of us with short attentiSQUIRREL!
So, Germany or Indonesia?
DeleteI'd guess Germany. Unless the word is pretty much meaningless there. There are so many words for Bigfoot-like critters. Around here, they're referred to as Skunk Apes.
DeleteWhich presumably subsist on skunk cabbage. I'll stop now...
ReplyDeleteI fondly recall the times in the 60's as a Scout, humping up the gear to the local mountaintops for the annual ARRL mountaintop relay extravaganza (I can't remember what it was called, please help my memory!) and cranking the generator to help recharge the batteries during ops...
ReplyDeleteGood days, y'all!
K74811, I think ??
I have no idea what "K74811" could refer to. For sure, it's not a ham call sign, and doesn't mean anything to me
DeleteI was interested in ham radio in the mid-60s but didn't get my license until '76, so it's rare for me to be able to say, "it was before my time," but it was.
"K74811" looks a bit like the CB call signs they used to issue in the 1950s to early 1970s.
DeleteBillB, the CB was three letters followed by four numbers - I was KAY2244 and my brother was KAX6867. K74811 was the call letters used by the old Ham who's gear we humped. I'm going by 50-year-old memory, sounds like I'm wrong. But it was the '60s and maybe he had an ancient license, I don't know...
DeleteStill and all, do any of you readers remember what the event was called where we climbed up to the top of a high hill or mountain and ran the rig from there??
Again, Old memories that are unclear. Perhaps I'll have a synapse trigger one day and actually remember. I doubt it.
The only thing I know of from the mid-60s where guys might have dragged a station up to a hilltop was the annual Field Day. Field Day has been the last weekend in June for as long as I can remember, but the league says "the 4th full weekend in June." The thing is, I know guys who were licensed in the mid-60s and calls weren't like that K74811. The prefix was one of two letters, K or W, if it was a W there were also WA and WB. Then there was a single digit, 0 to 9, followed by a suffix of up to three letters. There are more options now, with a prefix that starts with N, and far more options. I recently met a guy whose call starts with KQ4.
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ReplyDeleteAh, too late for me to participate this year, but I'll put it on the calendar for next – hopefully this merry bunch will be back for 2025! Thanks for posting, otherwise would've never known about this SES.
ReplyDeleteI got the impression from somewhere that it's an annual event. There's a long thread on QRZ.com about it and I think I read it in there.
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