We first decided to go roving about a month before the September 2016
contest. Neither of our QTHs are great for contests, with hills and local
noise.
K1SIG has now been out for 3 years, and I still don't think we know what
we're doing. We're apparently doing something right, with division records
and wins, but every single time out is a sort of barely controlled chaos.
It's the challenge of the thing. We try and find the best routes and
strategies, try and figure out how to cram all of this equipment into a
car. There are times we wonder what we are doing to ourselves, but it's
fun. We could be sitting in a room somewhere digging out contacts, or we
could take in a ton of scenery. Yeah, that scenery is for some weird reason
often a Lowe's parking lot, but it's also sometimes a mountain top. Our
best multi op efforts from home was a quarter of the points of our worst
rove.
You can be successful as a rover with modest equipment. You don't need a
kilowatt and a 20' beam up 50', loops and short beams work fine. We've had
luck with 2W and 2el on the microwaves.
Fixed stations are very appreciative of rovers and will go out of their way
to work us.
It may have been that your route was sort of a dud, if you're in VA you can
track North and you'll get into Packrats territory. There are a lot of
quite capable stations in Southern PA that would love to work you. It's
boring when you drive for hours with no contacts - we hit that when we went
through the center of NY state. No one there.
Roving isn't for everyone. I'm pretty sure that in order to mount a serious
rove you have to be a little nuts. We find it exciting, both in trying to
make contacts and in trying to keep the bailing wire and twine setup going
for a few more grids.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have. Our collection of rover sites
hasn't extended below PA, but I'm sure there are some out there for you.
What did you feel like you weren't doing right?
I'm a mod on /r/amateurradio, so I'm slightly familiar with it. I should
post there, yeah. I've been trying to drum up interest in the redditnet irc
channel and in the young hams discord. The younger crowd is a good target.
We haven't learned any better.
73,
Sean WA1TE
On Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 08:53 Detrick Merz <detrick@merzhaus.org> wrote:
> Randy Wing, wrote:
> > We all need to get others interested in roving and fixed operation!
>
> and Sean Waite, WA1TE, wrote:
> > I've been working on it. I almost had another rover...
>
> Here are some thoughts from the new guy on getting others interested: the
> wife and I did our first rover outing for June VHF this year. We only
> halfway knew what to expect, and have a ton to learn. In the end, we had
> fun, but I don't feel like we did it right, and don't entirely know why
> we'd want to do it again. Not that we don't, but I can't come up with any
> reason why. So there's perhaps one thing to do to get others interested:
> convince me that I should do rover (again).
>
> And here's the other part: how I even got started to begin with. I learned
> it was even a thing through Reddit after reading a post by KA5D. If you're
> not familiar, there's an Amateur Radio subreddit (
> https://reddit.com/r/amateurradio) that discusses any and all things ham
> related. Reddit has a generally younger crowd, and is probably a very good
> place to go trying to get others interested.
>
> -detrick
> K4IZ
>
>
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