All Track’s Lead To Chester: Caboosin’ Again At The Chester-On-Track Festival 2023

If there is anything I have learned about Chester, it’s that it has weather. Our first time at the caboose was Winter Field Day of 2021. There were record low temperatures that night and we were not sure we would be able to survive the cold quite literally. Our next time at the Caboose was for the annual Chester-On-Track event in 2022 to man a ham radio station. There were record high temperatures approaching 100 degrees. And this time? It rained in sheets, at least once afternoon hit.

Ignore that lonely looking photograph above. It’s there to show the tree from which I had the long leg of my 40M dipole attached to the flag pole that the balun was at. If you look closely you can see the wire. By then, Chester-On-Track was largely over and most people had gone home to escape the rain. I took a lot of these photos as I was packing up. You can see the rain hitting the puddle in the foreground.

Below, however, where you can see how I used the flag line to raise the dipole centerpiece, you get a better idea of turnout. Chester-On-Track, a town-wide event is centered on the Chester Railway Station & Museum. The parking spaces out front were full, and cars were lining the small hillside street. Despite the inclement weather, visitors still packed in.

I probably do not recommend this method of hanging a wire antenna on a flagpole. It was quite imperative that I get all of the trip hazards out of the way, as this year Dave put me inside to protect the radio equipment from the downpour. I would not be able to keep an eye on the antenna set up. So, unfortunately, the flag did get wrapped in the wire a few times despite my best effort to keep that from happening. I periodically went out and fixed it.

While I had the long leg of the 40M off-center fed dipole stretched out to a tree limb (in fact its the white birch across the parking lot at the bottom of the picture below), I tied the short leg of the antenna through the corbel of the overhanging roof and to the screw for the address number plate. Anyone who reads this blog will know I get a huge kick out of using existing features as antenna supports. And I spent the last ten minutes looking up what the overhanging support structures were called…yes, corbel.

Similarly, I ran the coax back at an angle, through another corbel and taped it too the window and wall of the station. I then ran in underneath an unused station door.

And this door was right around the corner from my choice inside location. Particularly choice because that painting in the background drew in a ton of attention from visitors.

If you remember our 2021 experience at the caboose, AA1F and I made very few contacts. In fact, we may have only had a single successful qso. We were so perplexed by the RF situation, that I wrote a blog modeling the experience. You can see a graphical representation of the geography, and the bulbous EZNEC radiation blob of the same 40M OCF antenna in a similar set-up below. Our 80M OCF similarly performed just as badly. At the time, we didn’t know what to make of it. Propagation? Bad luck? Ultimately, I think that the Chester Railway Station is sitting at the bottom a geographical salad bowl, in essence an RF dead zone. For the third time, I was essentially unable to make contacts. One POTA ssb, two FT-8, and two half CW contacts (there was too much QSB to finish the QSOs), with access to 10M, 15M, 20M, and 40M. Interestingly, I cannot get cell service on my personal phone there either. I was “on the air” for over four hours.

My set-up was the Yaesu FT-991A, an LDG Z-100 Plus autotuner, a 15ah Bioenno battery, the Vibroplex Code Warrior Junior paddle, microphone, audio splitter with Kenwood HS-5 headphones and a Bose external speaker, a PC, and 100 feet of RG8X coax cable. Of course, all of the various connectors as well.

And I was solo for this trip. AA1F stayed back with Georgia, our new puppy, who needs fairly constant attention at this point. I took a selfie, and my head is covering “our” caboose. I am developing quite an affection for the Chester Railway Station & Museum, and its kind proprietor Dave. The mysteries of the universe have connected us with this location, one hundred miles from our home.

The day was grey, and the weather forced a lot of last minute changes for the Chester-On-Track event. That said, there is something special about this little basin town. And a lot of people showed up to enjoy and support the railside community. I am really glad to be a part of it, even if the RF won’t cooperate.

The other thing I notice is how far I have come in the last few years with my personal radio journey. A sort of confidence building about my own level of knowledge. The ease of setting up a public event by myself. Being able to use three RF modes, well four if you count the fact that I use an AM carrier to tune up my matching unit, fairly thoughtlessly. Jumping from band to band and mode to mode, stretching just to make a contact or two with barely an indication that the radio was even working. But being self-assured enough to know that it certainly was. The intermingling of the technologies…

I have been exposed fairly recently to a concept I have been mulling over. The idea that men tend to like things, where women tend to like people. Well, the originators of that comment apparently forgot all of the old “shoes” jokes that used to be made about women… I mean that only partly in jest, but more so because I know a lot of women who have a lot of “things” they love and care about. Shoes on occasion being one of them. But really this concept seems to be offered as the explanation as to why women do not get involved more in tech fields. Because understanding technology does not appeal to women, because women care about people more than things.

At the Station, the vast majority of hardcore train enthusiasts, much like ham radio operators, appear to be men. Yet, I do not actually believe I am some anomaly. One of a tiny cohort of women that amateur radio appeals to. Rather I feel as though most women do not ever get a chance to like radio. Maybe even trains. Most of us do not know these worlds exist, and much like the occult, they are hidden from us. Not even maliciously or intentionally hidden, just by the nature of living parallel lives with limited intersection. If not for discovering the CB radio at a truck stop a few years ago, I would never be on this journey. No one ever told me ham radio existed. Who would have thought to? Instead of me being some unicorn, I believe that most women, like me, have no idea that there is a world of technology that they have never seen before. No one has ever pulled back the curtain and shown it to us. But the logic is circular, because I have had limited to no success in getting even one of my lady friends to become a ham. I wish I could.

I’ll end with one last story. A little boy holding a yellow model train engine asked if he could set up a “display” on the table next to me. He informed me that, unlike the other vendors in the station, he only had that single yellow engine to showcase. I of course, told him to feel free to set up his booth. In a deliberateness only a 10 year old boy could muster, he set his train engine down on the bare table. And then proceeded to inform everyone who walked by to take a look at his display. Let me tell you, the best medicine man of the wild west had nothing on this kid when it came to reeling in a crowd. Everyone he invited over cooed and cawed over his little yellow model train car. When his display finally ended with his family heading back to New York, he ran over to me with a second white model train engine that he had bargained a seller for, and let me know that next year he had a second part to his display.

I spent some time thinking about this later. And you know what? I just can’t see how I am any different from that little boy. I mean, just c’mon now, ask me about ham radio. I dare you.

73s,

KM1NDY