I've been a member of several ham clubs over the years here in Denver.  The clubs with the older guys no longer could do tower and antenna work and the other clubs were more social in nature and preferred getting together to drink than to focus on ham radio.  I was a member of the Mile High DX Club for a year but discovered most of the members were of the upper class economically speaking, running big huge towers and amplifiers which could run 3, 4,  and 5 KW output during a contest all weekend straight, and they were not interested in someone with a pip squeak of a station I ran.  Strange, though.  I worked as much DX as they did and could out do any of them that were big contesters as far as CW speed was concerned.  If I worked any of them in a contest, they'd always bump the speed up to quicken the exchange because they'd heard me on the air running 50 and 60 words per minute back then so they knew.  I made friends with a neighbor ham who drove a yellow cab for a living.  We even took the cab once to a big ham DX club meeting where there was a lot of socializing and drinking.  I enjoyed the drunks more than the big contesters; most of which you'd know if I mentioned their call signs.  My friend began helping me with some tower work because he and I lived about 6 blocks apart and he had collected tower sections until he put up a 130 foot tower.  I'd go over to his place to operate but he, due to his  job, was ignored, as was I, at the DX club meeting so he and I both dropped out and quit paying dues.  I have a contest buddy in western Colorado who used to own a 5 tower, big antenna farm, on top of a flat mesa at 10,000 feet.  He was a common old guy who just liked people so over the years, he would drive over 200 miles to come and help me with tower and antenna work.  He still climbs but 200 miles is a long ways to go just to put up a 40 meter rotary dipole and a 3 element 6 meter beam, plus, he's in his early sixties now, too.  The big contesters are generally a different breed of ham; the real competitive types I'm referring to.  You know, the ones that live for getting into the top 10 in every contest and who often have put thousands into tall towers and wide spaced, multiple element, stacked beams.  Bigger and taller means more regular maintenance so you can see, since they have to either pay for cranes and commercial tower workers to come and work on tower and antenna maintenance, they might act a little different when you say you have a 3 element tri bander up on a 3 foot tripod, and a 10 foot mast, with an AR22 rotor from back in the fifties, all up at 20 feet above ground.  You ain't in their class, bro.  I stop showing up for field days, unless it was an individual private group instead of a club, because the bigger the club, the more drunks we had.  I finally decided, even as a teenager hot to trot on running Field Day, that the rules for FD were to see how many beers you could drink during a 24 to 30 hour period.  I learned quickly just how much tower work there is in having a normal 2 element 40 meter beam at 70 feet due to wind load.  Imagine what it is like to have huge antennas, stacked, up 100 and 200 and 300 foot contest towers.  I knew a guy in Missouri that got, from a junk yard where his friend worked, a 190 foot free standing satellite disk tower.  He hired a professional commercial company to put it up and he guyed it and put a 2 element 80 meter beam on top of it.  During the installation of the tower, one of the professional workers slipped and fell from the 120 foot level and was killed.  He cancelled the project for a year it got to him so badly.  Eventually he got it up and the very first winter, ice built up, plus wind load, and the 40 foot boom cracked.  He had to pay guys to help him drag it off the tower, then he repaired the boom, and the commercial guys helped put it back up.  So, if you've got money, you'll find help and a lot quicker in most cases.  The biggest ham club in Denver used to have a volunteer group of guys and if you were a club member, just 20 dollars a year, they would, when you called for help, put you on a schedule and then two or three or four guys, or whatever the job required, all show up and get everything done you needed.  The are bigger now and they discontinued that service.  Just a few thoughts of encouragement from a guy that thought his 7 months of being a novice running 10 watts to a 100 foot untuned long wire was the funnist time of his ham years.  The only thing the has come close is when I owned the 2 element 40 meter beam at 70 feet.  My first single band contest on 40 I worked 403 contacts in the first 24 hours, I couldn't go 48 hours with that small amount of sleep, about 80 countries, on 40 CW.  I worked Japan long path beaming over South America at 2 PM in the afternoon, down to southern Europe beaming long path about 4 to 5 in the morning beaming to the southwest long path, and I worked Europeans starting at 2:30 in the afternoon; long before the sun set hour.  I worked Israel right after getting the antenna up on August the first with a 10 over S 9 signal and I was just using the SB220 for an amp at the time.  I've decided to drag the river bottom till I find some assistance to at least get what undersized stuff up at 40 feet this next summer.  As I said before, my son is able to climb that small of tower and fiddle with those smaller antennas so that helps.

Phil.
K0NX