Raleigh Amateur Radio Society (RARS) 1990 Field Day
Channel: Gary Pearce
Date: 2022-07-06

This is my 'documentary' video of the Raleigh Amateur Radio Society 1990 Field Day operation at Camp Butner, a few miles north of Raleigh. Bob Keys NA4G was Field Day chair that year (Bob became a Silent Key in January 2022). There are actually three separate operations: A QRP/Battery group, a QRO group, and a 'Novice/Tech' station (before the ARRL came up with the GOTA station idea). Note that logging and dupe checking was all on paper. Well, almost - I see one vintage laptop in there running DOS. 

If you're a RARS member, or more likely in the RARS diaspora, you might recognize some of the many hams who appear in the video. Only a few are still in the club, and like Bob, more than a few have passed away. Some of the younger ones are now middle aged or even senior citizens! I was club President in '98/'99, but I have moved away and only visit now and then.

About the video: I had just moved to Raleigh in January 1990 to start a new job with a video editing company. My ham activity had been fairly fallow during the 80's, but I was jumping back in with the RARS club. I shot the video on my 8mm consumer video camera, and edited it on 3/4" video at my new company. I made a bunch of VHS copies for club members. This video comes from one of those VHS copies. Even if I had the 3/4" master, I'd be hard pressed to find anyone with a playback deck to copy it from (at least not without spending a lot of money). So the quality of the video was never that great. As it was, I had to dust off a VHS deck from my shelves and hope it worked, and the tape would play as I digitized it. Fortunately, everything worked as smoothly as it had before I 'decommissioned' my own 'antique' video hardware.

Interesting to note that while consumer VHS and 8mm video cameras had been available for about a decade at this point, they weren't exactly common. And editing capability for consumers was rudimentary at best. I was using the company's 'low-end' edit room, where I usually did pre-edits to send on to the main edit room. This project was finished in that low-end room. I could do rudimentary titles, but I couldn't do dissolves or other transitions, so it's all 'cuts'. 

73, Gary K4AAQ (formerly KN4AQ)