Two club members, whom on second thought I won't identify publicly at this time, bought a set of Drake Twins (R4 & T4X) at WASHFest and are currently in the process of bringing them back to life.

One of them has now come up with a wonderful idea... well, I don't want to sound critical, but I'm not so sure. To wit:

Why not run a "classic rig" Field Day operation? No pure solid-state rigs, tube rigs and hybrids only.

I have sudden memories of W2MO Field Day 1972 -- army surplus canvas tents (hot hot hot!!!), big heavy tube rigs with lots of knobs (modern rigs at the time, today's boat anchors), and a generator that was loud, noisy, smelly, and ran out of gas every two hours. Sure, it was fun... but lugging around all that iron today?

At tonight's meeting, the consensus appears to be to run a "classic" station or two at N3SH, but not the whole operation. (For one thing, we have a good many ops who have no idea how to tune a tube final. I'll be more than happy to teach them, but you know how FD can be in the wee hours with minimal operators...)

What do you think?