I lived in West Seattle until 6th grade, the out to Maple Valley. After 8 years pushing submarines around on the ocean floor and in between, I returned to the north end of town in '85.
My radio interests gravitated to weak signal VHF, UHF and microwave contesting mostly as a rover, with some home HF monitoring or country gathering at times. When I am on it is mostly weak signal terrestial, EME, or meteor scatter contacts so I do not get on repeaters any more. Not enough time in a day. That and fishing competed with motorcycling so fishing was dropped a few years back.
http://www.K7MDL.net has the several microwave and VHF projects I built and my rover vehicles and digital/satellite/progagation modeling presentations I have given. I plan to pack some beam antennas and KB6KQ loops on the roof racks of the Grandby and hit some mountain tops this year a few times. I went up Slate peak (7400ft) and Tiffany Springs (6900ft) campgrounds last summer for the CQ VHF contest for example.
So some of my mods will be for 12VDC and 26VDC bulk power, others for bulky armored MC riding gear, and some for antenna mounting, rotators, and mast setups on site/on truck. The web site you can see all the aluminum my past trucks have carried up top on the canopies
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
. I just spent the night in the truck cab back then for a weekend contest. Now I am looking for more comfort and a slower pace and look for great remote destinations.
Maybe we need to set a date such as radio contest weekend and invite all and anyone at some choice location. Mix it up a bit, yet loose. Or just a local get together. Could be at my place even, I am easy. In our MC adventure riding circles, we have established meet and greets every week at designated north, eastside, and south locations. We also a few times a year have a garage party where we bring our bikes to a host's home garage and we all work on bikes making mods and repairs and swapping stories and learning, like how to shim the valves, change tires, replace clutch plates, share special purpose tooling and skills, welding. Several times these are accompanied by a pot-luck type lunch opportunity where people will bring something along and the BBQ gets fired up (though I do not have one anymore - I do not cook!)
I have seen some serious camper mods tailored to mobile radio contesting. I do not intend to go there myself, but plenty of smaller changes I want to make like gas spring lifts, cabinet changes, and electrics. I happen to be a former navy nuclear electrician, electronics design engineer, and kept reasonably current on electrical and communication/navigation installations through my boating and radio and motorcycling interests. So if anyone has need for electrical assistance on your campers feel free to ping me, I can likely help.