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KnightLites Pigout Pig Pickin' 2015

The 10th annual Pig Pickin' happened on September 19 at the White House, the home of Joe (WA4GIR) and Liz (KO4CK) White.  The weather was great, the food was good, and the socializing was tough to beat.

The KnightLites meet monthly at the Golden Coral in RTP on the third Thursday of each month; however, in September the White's host a pig pickin' on the Saturday following the normal meeting date in place of the monthly meeting.  The back patio becomes the picnic area, and the basement shop area becomes the gathering area and a place for show and tell of the Knights latest projects.

The Pickin' start out with a period of socializing to catch up with the latest going ons of your fellow nights:

Here we have right to left:

  Dick, N4HAY (back to us)

  John Paul, AB4PP

  Bob Kellog, AE4IC

  Paul Stroud, AA4XX (back to us)

Rye Gewalt K9LCI

Chris Waldrup, KD4PBJ

John Marshall, KA4UF

Chris (Rich)  Carpenter, N4PBQ

Michael North, KK4EIB

Gary O'Neil,  N3GO

Irv McWherter, K3IRV

Jack Carey, N4LK

Joe White, WA4GIR

Pig Pickin's would not be Pig Pickin's without pork, so here's how we start -- note that it's still dark outside:

...and 11 hours later, we have:

Couple the meat with a lot of side dishes like slaw, banana pudding, baked beans and you have a feast.   Then to wrap it up there were the desserts:  homemade apple pie, rhubarb/strawberry pie just to name a few.   No one had any reason to go away hungry.  Sorry I didn't get a picture of the table (note to self:  Take that photo next year!), but it would only make you drool on your keyboard.

But it wasn't all about eating.  We also had show and tell to explain to our fellow nights what we'd been up to.   Here's Gary's (N3GO) environmental chamber, cleverly disguised as a cardboard box, that he uses to evaluate oscillator designs for the soon-to-be-released Retrydyne transceiver.  The oscillator prototype is inside the chamber with the counter monitoring the oscillator frequency.  The metered variac controls the heat source -- a light bulb -- in the box with the oscillator.

Following that is Dick's collection of regenerative receivers that he has constructed, as well as other homebrew things.

Finally, Chris brought a sampling of his latest projects which don't really represent the many working projects that Chris has produced, but I suspect that he left many of his recent projects at home because he didn't want to make the rest of us look too bad.  Here he has a LF converter built from the Nov. 08 QST in the grey diecast box in front, a 40m WSPR transmitter from Sprat behind it, an LED lantern in the glass jar, a data acquistion system in the black box with grey panel in back, the Ozarkon regen with knobs and dials on a black panel, and finally Geiger counter power supply on the bare copper board.