06/30/2026
What does it take to make a GOTA station “sing”? Read this short tale of tech and team triumph by Shannon Boal, GARS VP:
“At May and June GARS general meetings, it was decided to make GOTA (Get on the Air!) a priority for this year's field day. The "spark plugs" driving that GOTA decision were Vicky and Kevin Miller. Mike Martel and Tom Warren had a field meeting with folks about four weeks ago, and I came away tasked with producing an antenna system that would allow simultaneous operation of two 20 meter stations. That was so that the GOTA station would have an effective band, without penalizing the EOC station. The city of Waldo, and our new city manager, Amanda Brown (KG5JZS), hosted us. GARS funded this. Components were sourced from California, Nebraska, New Hampshire, China, and England. I designed the system, and built the parts. I used Jim Carr's observation, at an antenna building class four years ago, that the light tower prevented us from communicating with the 820 repeater. It blocked the signal.... (Light bulb moment!) I sat in a ham op's presentation at Hamcation two years ago, reviewing his work in isolating antennas on his farm in Ohio. I cannot remember his name! Our system of simple dipoles was painstakingly built, tuned and tested, with many hours of work from our club members. Terry Gordon, Kevin Miller, Tom Warren, Vicky Miller,Debra Boal, Mike Martell, Jim Carr, Bill Sewell, Andy Bryson, Eddie Dempsey, Larry Rovak and others all worked long hours in the sweltering outdoors, adjusting and testing. Slingshot operators slung and hauled lines. Drone pilots Jim and Don dropped lines in tricky, inaccessible locations. All of that effort, to make that simple thing sing. And, sing it Did: clean, clear signals! New hams at the GOTA station were not frustrated by the difficulty of lousy conditions. An outstanding CW operator, Lorilyn Roberts was still operating when a crew inadvertently lowered the dipole antenna. So, she switched to the hexbeam directional antenna, and found....that the dipole system was actually better! There are more chapters that can be written, on the support and raising of the off-center-fed antenna; the new remote-auto-tuner-vertical, and the fantastic food.....de K4GLM, Shannon Boal”
