February 7th we drove 110 miles to Gila Bend, AZ. Here is our campsite at Augie's Quail Trail RV Park, which we also stayed at in Feb 2005. Nice big sites:
We were here for the RV2WaySat Rally. Our neighbor, Art, had the original setup people started with. It was a house mount on a piece of plywood.
The Rally info sign:
The meeting room:
Registration "staff":
More people in the main room:
Bill moderated the walk around, where we looked at various systems in the park. This is the campground's own internet connection, a 0.98 meter dish permanently mounted using a 2 watt transmitter. This dish and the 2 watt transmitter allow the campground to subscribe to a higher speed and more expensive plan than the normal 0.74 meter dish and 1 watt transmitter allow:
A typical scene from the walk around. This one has Ron showing off his homemade setup (Ron is mostly hidden here):
Winegard prototype tripod design. This got a lot of people excited since that meant a big company was getting involved. Of course most had critiques of the tripod design, but it is a prototype.
Bill was involved in multiple "expert" panels. Here is how a seminar or panel looked:
Diane's parents were also at the rally so Diane spent a lot of her time with her mother, including a shopping trip to Avondale about an hour away.
We tried various places to eat in town and only Little Italy makes the list, the rest were not very good.
The weather was quite nice for the rally with little wind. It got hot a couple days but we had 50AMPs and could run both air conditioners.
About a third of the rally attendees were also heading to the Gypsy Journal Rally in Casa Grande, including us.