In 2011, I became curious as to how an HF station might operate from a moving passenger train. Many ham operators design and test their equipment to operate in harsh emergency conditions. Those operating conditions are never the same and never predictable. Operating “railroad mobile” would be another opportunity to adapt HF gear to an environment that was certainly not designed with long range communications in mind. A modest test involved a simple 20 meter wire attached to some existing insulators on a rail car’s roof. A small group of operators made some good contacts and seeded the idea for a railroad mobile club.

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