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*                ATGP 2018 Report for CLINGMAN's DOME                    75
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Hello All ATGP operators,

This was my 3rd year to participate and my 2nd year assisting / running 
CLNGMN-2. Arrived on the Dome around 8:45am with David Hulsey, KK4DQO, to 
a sunny but VERY windy morning. The heavy storms had roll through around 
5am with much thunder and lightening as we were camped in my camper at 
Smokemont camp ground.   Winds were easily sustained at 20mph gusting 
upwards to 50mph, strong enough to roll my Tahoe backward while in park.  
Antenna setup of my N9TAX dual band JPole on the 20' telescopic fiberglass 
Crappie pole. I also had a ARROW Yagi pointed South for talking "long 
distance" on 2 meters.

My TM-D710G was still configured from last years run so a run though of the 
settings to confirm all was ok then tested the voice links. Discovered I 
had either a bad coax jumper or a bad UHF passthrough in my go box. 
Connected coax directly to D710G and all was good. We were up and running 
fully operational around 10:30am or so. Very soon I was seeing seeing 
SPRNGR-1 and ROAN-3. Voice  on 445.925 was good to Springer but Roan had 
some issues and was sending me messages to let me know that he was copying 
my traffic. Mark, N4YH, over near Chattanooga was monitoring with his iGate 
and we spoke several times as he was seeing the stations beginning to report. 
He was very helpful.

Overall I saw stations 1-10 . No others made it my way as you can see in 
the list on my radio.

Picture can be seen here
https://www.facebook.com/EtowahValleyAmateurRadioClub/posts/1756376144483725 


I do wish we could organizer an event like this in our regions and do 
this more than once a year to hep us improve our knowledge of our gear.

I missed Larry Ford, K4AEC, and hope he will rejoin me on the Dome next 
year.

Automobile/pedestrian traffic at the Dome is like your largest Christmas 
lights tour, Hi Hi! We had many people asking if we were tracking bears 
or the weather!

Looking forward to next year!

Greg de-KK4YLX