***************************************************************************
*                  ATGP 2018 Report for ROAN MOUNTAIN                    75
***************************************************************************


This year Roan Mountain was covered by Bill KB4KFT and Glenn N4AZR.

I arrived on site at about 1015am and had my gear deployed by about 1030am. 
I quickly established solid voice and data contact with Comers Rock. For 
some reason I could only raise Clingmans Dome on 2m data. Their 440 voice 
signal was weak - barely broke squelch but perfectly readable. By 
comparison their 2m signal was a solid S7. Even with high power I could not 
make the trip to Clingmans. Strange.

Bill KB4KFT arrived at about 1100am. Just before he arrived, I noticed that 
I was having radio issues. My D700 was randomly cutting off. I suspected 
battery but tried to ride it out because I had good data contact with my 
adjacent sites when it was working. After the third incident, we decided 
that my marine battery was dead. In the back of my mind I had planned to 
hook everything up to my car battery as a last resort. As luck would have 
it, Bill had a freshly charged gel cell in his car for an event later. We 
swapped the power wiring over and got my D700 back online a few minutes later.

After getting everything back online, Todd AL0I advised that I wasn't 
digipeating anymore. Ugh! I always bring my netbook and serial cable with 
me so I fired that up and checked the programming. The hard resets wiped 
out the serial port settings on my D700. I plugged those back in and then 
everything was good. We were back up and operational by around noon.

We saw Springer Mountain through Apple Orchard Mountain packets reliably 
through to the 1 PM hour. We all exchanged a few messages and I got ack's 
for mine. Neat!

Also around 1 PM a former ATGP participant stopped by. Eric KZ5ED was part 
of the original crew covering Roan Mountain when I discovered this event in 
2010. He was very excited to see that we are still trying every year, and 
even more excited to hear about our successes in 2014 and 2017. He said he 
plans to stop by again next year.

We were beginning to get worried that we would not get any further than 
Apple Orchard when we finally saw Hawksbill and GD Hill at about 1:15 pm. 
Then we saw Camelback at about 1:40 pm and Sams Point at about 2:00 pm.

Bob called for the GP attempt with what we had at 2:00 pm. We sent a 
bulletin and so did many others.

Bill KB4KFT had to leave around 3:00 pm. We shut it down at about 3:05pm. 
Bill plans to return next year as do I. Hopefully my friends that joined 
me last year will be able to come next year as we had planned to do HF.

The weather was good the entire time. The forecast called for thunderstorms 
all day which I was dreading, but as luck would have it it was mostly sunny 
all day. Temps were in the 60's - 70's.

My setup is pretty simple. A D700, drive on antenna base, 20 ft of 
fiberglass pole, and a Diamond 2m / 440 vertical fed with LMR-400. I think 
I'm going to look into getting one of the new batteries that have been 
talked about recently on the list. It may be time to retire the 4 year old 
marine battery that I have been using if for no other reason than to avoid 
the liability next year.

Also new for this year, if I held my phone in just the right place I 
actually had 4G LTE service on top of Roan. This allowed me to stay on 
ANSRVR with APRSDroid and keep informed of what was going on.

We had a LOT of curious people this year. More than I have ever seen. So 
many that it was hard to pay attention to the radios at times. They were 
all fascinated with what we were doing once we explained it to them.

Special thanks to Bill KB4KFT for having the battery ready to go and saving 
the day. Also thanks to Ted KB8LMR from my club for making the trip to 
Comers Rock for his first and hopefully not last event. And thanks to Todd 
AL0I for providing excellent local support via 440 voice as always.

See you all next year!
Glenn N4AZR