How does your club communicate on tours?

[Bud]

Our club had an outing (I did not attend) and the folks with high compression heads and overdrives ran in a pack. The person that told me this has a standard A, and in trying to keep up had his car overheat. Nobody stopped, just left him on his own. Years ago they used the principle that you were responsible for the car behind you. Not so much anymore. Also, in our club they have an award called the FORD award (Found On Road Dead) that if you are on an outing and you break down, if the person who has the FORD award sees it, he awards you with it at the next club meeting. So you have to catch the next person. It tends to discourage members from touring. If I ever get it, I plan to destroy the trophy. All its for is for some members (generally the ones with the better cars) to laugh at others.

[Tom Endy]

Years ago, when I did a lot of touring, we had a clean-up man who was the last car at the end of the group. His job was to stop when he saw a Model a pulled over and render aid. He was always someone who spoke Model A well. No one was left behind.

Tom Endy

[Tom Endy]

Originally Posted by Bud

Our club had an outing (I did not attend) and the folks with high compression heads and overdrives ran in a pack. The person that told me this has a standard A, and in trying to keep up had his car overheat. Nobody stopped, just left him on his own. Years ago they used the principle that you were responsible for the car behind you. Not so much anymore. Also, in our club they have an award called the FORD award (Found On Road Dead) that if you are on an outing and you break down, if the person who has the FORD award sees it, he awards you with it at the next club meeting. So you have to catch the next person. It tends to discourage members from touring. If I ever get it, I plan to destroy the trophy. All its for is for some members (generally the ones with the better cars) to laugh at others.

It's called the hard luck trophy by most Model A clubs, and most have discontinued it because it can cause hard feeling.

At the 1990 MAFCA meet in San Diego the hard luck trophy was still in vogue. During the grand tour a Model A was involved in a serious accident with injury. At the banquet the last evening the hard luck trophy was awarded to the people involved in the accident. When it was announced you could have heard a pin drop. The lady that received the award was wearing a neck brace because of the accident. She had to walk some distance to the podium, when she got there, she threw the trophy at them.

MAFCA discontinued the award after that, in its place a person can submit an "adventure" story and receive an award.

My local club also had a distasteful incident involving the hard luck trophy. I suggested it be retired. The response was, "but we've always had it".

Tom Endy

[David in San Antonio]

Tom, Funny you should mention the Clean-Up Man. When I bought The Wretched Roadster, the former owner said his father was “the wagon master”, charged with helping any cars in trouble. Said the car was “a treasure trove” of spare parts. He wasn’t kidding. The trunk was filled with tools and electrical parts, including General Electric Mazda lamps and four generator cut-outs. However, when I removed the seat I found many more parts, most wrapped in red cloth shop rags including several Zenith carbs, a generator, a jack, and much more, including an entire axle half shaft. No wonder the car weighed about 400 pounds more than spec.

[shew01]

Originally Posted by updraught

Text messages usually get thru eventually when reception is spotty.
You could try an app called "Signal", might be handy if people are well spread out and can report where they are.

Thanks for the tip about the signal app. This may have some promise for us. :-)

[mcgarrett]

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There is another phone app called Zello. It makes your smart phone work like a "walkie talkie" and is push-to-talk. Works in real-time; no hassle with text messages or having to dial a phone # when you want to speak to someone. Download the app on your smart phone from your phone app store and add the phone #'s you want to communicate with. Give it a trial run to see if it works for you and your group.

[JayJay]

All this discussion about various ways to use cell phones assumes that you have cell coverage. Out here in the Wild West the best Model A roads have spotty or no cell coverage, that's why we continue to use CBs. Our club had a tech seminar last week about the various factors affecting CB performance put on by a club member who is a retired radio communications engineer. Very informative. (Breaker breaker you got a copy? RIP William Dale Fries Jr., aka C.W. McCall.)

[BRENT in 10-uh-C]

I had purposely stayed out of this when this thread first 'aired' because this is one of my pet peeves about Model-A clubs.

I honestly do not understand the importance of having communications with each Model-A out on a tour. To me, this is much akin to a bunch of Kindergarteners going to the bathroom together at school. Each of those little kids knows exactly where their bathroom is however they all must line-up in the hallway first, ...and then follow their Teacher as they walk single-file to the bathroom. Maybe the Model-A club got their idea to do this from watching funeral processions.

Seriously though, if the club's Tour Leader has a certain route they specifically want their group of cars to follow, then how hard is it for them to give a set of printed instructions for each participating car's driver to follow? This takes the panic out of following the car in front of them, and allows the entire group to not be a hinderance to other motorists. If one car in the group has an issue and needs to pull over, it is foolish, inconvenient, -and often times dangerous for the rest of the group to pull over and wait. For any needed communications, why not just use your cell phone?

Ohh, and don't get me started on how 'tacky' looking most Model-A CB installations are!!

[Pete]

For many years I was in charge of maintaining a large fleet of mobile and base station commercial 2 way radios including mountain top repeaters. This system worked basically the same as the current cell phone system only on a smaller scale.
(100 mile radius)
I was and still am involved in amateur (ham) radio in which there is a very large group that has a nation wide coverage system that we can talk on any time we feel like it.
It takes a certain type of interest to do all of this, kind of like being interested in model A's, however, there are very few people that have both interests.
In the past class D CB was all that was available to people that did not want to either pay for commercial service or spend a couple hours learning how to get a ham license.
Like Brent said, most "done at home" CB installations looked exactly like that. Double back tape, used house wire and a 9 foot antenna held askew off of the back bumper with hose clamps.
Modern mobile 2 way radio installations can be completely invisible.
For the most part, it boils down to, model A people do not want to learn a new tech system in order to drive their cars. They will suffer through with cell phones, printed instructions or nothing.
Radio people will have whatever they want. The only problem with some radio people, they tend to be a "ratchetjaw".

[TerryO]

Walkie talkies...no installation and simple to use...


TOB

[Pete]

Originally Posted by TerryO

Walkie talkies...no installation and simple to use...TOB

Right on both counts but impossible to train some people to use.

[shew01]

I can see benefit in group messaging (in Signal) while driving (for the passengers) as well as group messaging during tour group stops. Sometimes, it's hard to chase down everyone if some folks are distracted shopping, looking for something to eat, etc. Group messaging could be handy in a number of situations, maybe even for leaving last minute instruction to the group after some members have gone to bed for the evening--those folks would get the message in the morning without having their sleep disturbed.

Originally Posted by updraught

Text messages usually get thru eventually when reception is spotty.

You could try an app called "Signal", might be handy if people are well spread out and can report where they are.

I think "eventually" getting a message through to everyone when cell coverage returns is valuable. Not having to carry additional hardware is a perk of using a cell phone app. (Even most 80 year old tour group members tend to have a smart phone nowadays.) Also, the cell phone is likely to be carried in a pocket or purse when the owner is out of the car--so, the app would allow group communication while not actually being in the car.

Signal seems interesting because it is free, and it is available for Android, iPhone/iPad, and Windows. (See https://signal.org/download/) I installed the app on my iPhone, and it turns out that some of my coworkers already use it extensively. I am told that Signal can do pretty much all that iPhone Facetime and Messages do, only across multiple platforms (i.e., without requiring all the phones being iPhones).

updraught, thanks for sharing the idea. It has some possibilities I haven't found elsewhere.

[TerryO]

We also use the walkie talkies while traveling to the tour in our modern trucks (pit stops, restaurants, etc). Again they are very portable and good ones have a pretty long range...
TOB

[Bob Bidonde]

We communicate by a printed handout with tour directions, a drivers meeting just before kickoff, and rarely by cell phone in the event of an issue.