As many of you have heard or those who saw our early flier
at various places, the Arizona ScQRPions Forums and Campout for 2009 will be
held at Fort Tuthill the first weekend of August 2009.
We are moving our usual activities from the Arizona ARRL Convention at
Williams which is being held again this year, July 17-19.
There is apparently some confusion as to WHO is going to Fort Tuthill. Hopefully the remainder of this will clear
this up before any rumors get out of hand.
The Arizona ScQRPions QRP Group is moving our activities to Fort Tuthill at
Flagstaff, NOT the Arizona State ARRL Convention at Williams. This is for a variety of reasons unrelated
to the Williams ARRL Convention. These include economic considerations,
nostalgia, and the desire of many of our usual gang to return to a bit more
leisurely paced weekend more focused on operating and spending time with
friends as we did in the past at Fort Tuthill (the
nostalgia part).
We have always been independent of the Williams hamfest just as we were
independent of the old hamfest at Fort Tuthill. We
have chosen in the past to take advantage of the synergy of the ARRL, ARA and
ScQRPions by holding our activities simultaneously with their major hamfest.
Our guys absolutely love flea markets and many, if not all the zonies, will make the trip to Williams in addition to the trek to Fort Tuthill on July 30, 31, and August 1. We urge you all to give your full support to the convention at Williams thereby ensuring its success. These things are tough to put on and in the long run it is YOUR steadfast attendance and support that will make it as big a success as the old Ft. Tuthill! Stop the whining about another 25 miles and get up there. You may be pleasantly surprised. If you DON’T go, why would the vendors and guys in the tailgate area ever attend? YOU are the reason anyone goes to all this trouble. If YOU are there, THEY will come. Drag YOUR old stuff up there and put it on the tailgate.
Williams is a pleasant little town that has gone to a lot of
trouble to accommodate this convention and the area campgrounds are FAR
superior to Flagstaff. You’ll have to
work hard to find a restaurant as good as the Buffalo Pointe.
The major components of our activities are camping, visiting with old friends
and the making of new, operating at the campgrounds, technical forums, showing
off our latest homebrew projects, looking at new kits, tailgate trading, and
our Saturday evening picnics. We might even add a dummy load QSO party
and building contest. We will have our
usual full Saturday of forums which is shaping up to be another very good
one. The forums will be held at at the
Holiday Inn Express on I-40 beginning at 8am.
We will have complimentary coffee, juice, breakfast rolls, and other
refreshments throughout the day. Our
forums were streamed live to the internet in 2008 and the stars are lining up
to do so again this year for those who can't get there.
All of our activities except the forums are at the campground. Everyone
is welcome as you always have been and, as in the past, there is no charge for
any of our activities including the picnic and prize drawings. We supply
everything for the picnic except for your "entree." We're just
happy for you to join us and "pass a good time."*
73 john k5js
Feenix, Arizona
* Thanks to N5IB for the phrase from South Louisiana...