N8T - Bring on the Bridge II Special Event

The North Country National Scenic Trail crosses the Mackinac Straits Bridge between St. Ignace, Michigan and Mackinac City, Michigan. The bridge is open to pedestrian traffic one day per year - Labor Day. NCT hikers wanting to score this five mile trail segment need to hike it during this event.

The Hiawatha Shore-to-Shore chapter of the NCTA hosts this encampment each year to permit NCT hikers to gather for a few days of hiking and story swapping at the old county fair grounds near Moran, Michigan culminating in a group hike across the bridge. The HSS Chapter web is here: http://www.northcountrytrail.org/hss/index.htm .

Lake Effect ARC and Eastern UP ARC ( ) jointly sponsor the associated radio event. All hams, regardless of class, are welcome to take a turn at the mike and/or keyboard. Contact John, kc8ule (kc8ule@arrl.net) or Marv (kc8mld@lighthouse.net) for participation info.

Operating Sked:

Note: sked a qso: 906 869x6621
Also: monitoring 146.520 simplex and 146.640 (no tone) repeater

 QSL Route

Lake Effect ARC / N8T
36 Southfork St
Marquette, MI 49855

Get out!  Take a Hike!

After-Action Report:

After Action / AfterMath: Bring on the Bridge II Event. It was an event to remember. Over Labor Day weekend, Lake Effect operated as N8T recognizing the one day each year that the five mile segment of the North Country National Scenic Trail that goes over the Mackinac Straits Bridge is open to hiking. We were operating from the former Mackinac County fairgrounds near Moran, Michigan where there was an annual camp-in of NCT hikers doing some local hikes and waiting for the Big Day on Mighty Mac. It was all good until the old standby operating shelter took one for the team and got blown to flinders by gale-force winds on Friday night.

The shelter was also, of course, the support for the wire antenna mast SO we dropped back to Plan B, operating out of the van using just a set of hamstick whips. Worked tolerably well, all in all. 57 contacts mostly on 20m PSK, including both California and Alaska. Worked one ham in Tennessee running two watts SSB off a solar panel. Two watts! SSB!! Brian, KB9ZPK made cell contact and we hunted around until we finally found a useable channel on 75 and got a loggable qso. As usual it was fun to see the contacts shifting westward as the evening wore on.  Also – another indicator of the interpenetration of radio and the web – the N8T QRZ web page got almost 900 hits in the runup to the event. Every hit resulted in the hitter picking up a little knowledge about the theme of the event in addition to logistics. I’d say we did ok on the PR front for sure.

Other casualties: one inverter, possibly the old Win98 laptop  - it’s been air-drying for several days now.  One spooky picture – this is John, KC8ULE, operating in the front seat of the van by headlamp (upper left) operating PSK (can kind of see hands on the keyboard below screen; the tuning window on the Kenwood rig is behind the laptop (on the dashboard):

It was a couple of dark and stormy nights – but ended with a pretty spectacular full horizon-to-horizon rainbow. We finally figured that this meant the pot o’gold was not in the porta-pot though!

Finally, the resulting QSL card. Pretty info-intense – described the local event, the radio event, has some words about the trail and, oh yes!, the qso factoids. Pretty outstanding design job!

Thanks! to Brian, KB9ZPK, Marge, KD8AIL, Marv, KC8MLD, Char, KC8NEC, and Ron, W8DR, MidCars SCO’s and Bruce Matthews, Exec Director of the North Country Trail Association, for encouragement, direct and indirect support of this operation.