ARRL Field Day

[mtnbkr]

What are our resident radio geeks doing for field day (week and a half away)?  My club is setting up a 3A site and I'll be running a solar powered QRP station on 10m-80m.  My antenna will be a 120ft dipole fed with ladder line and tuned with an Emtech ZM-2 tuner I built last year.  Pretty much the same set up I used last year.  I may disconnect from the big dipole for a little bit and try a portable inverted-v antenna (50ft of zipline suspended by a crappie pole).  I'm only running 5 watts, but I was getting out as far as California to the west, Toronto to the north, and Florida to the south.

My club's callsign is w4ovh.

Chris

[KD5NRH]

What are our resident radio geeks doing for field day (week and a half away)?  My club is setting up a 3A site and I'll be running a solar powered QRP station on 10m-80m.

We're doing comms for a bike race that morning, then I'll probably have to get some sleep before I head to work that night, but I'll try to get out to the Field Day site for a bit.  We got a special event 1x1 call for the combined event.  I think it's K5K, but I don't remember for sure.

[Boomhauer]

I gotta work 8:30AM-5:00PM Saturday, then I'll be hanging out with the radio club until 12:00PM or so, then going home to catch some sleep.

What pisses me off is that the 27th is also the day our Experimental Aircraft Association group is doing their Young Eagles program, so I won't be able to help with that. And I am explicitly not allowed to take off from work.

[mtnbkr]

Off to field day, listen for W4OVH.  :D

Chris

[cosine]

How was it? Where's the post-Field Day report?

I didn't get to do anything because of my grandparent's 50th wedding anniversary, but I did stop by the Milwaukee Repeater Club setup, WI9MRC, for about 10 minutes.

[Boomhauer]

Eh, we did pretty well. However, my coworker who did Field Day with another club to the south of us reported that her club was incompetent (set up antennas wrong, bad equipment, club members didn't know what they were doing). We had a nice setup under an open air shelter at the town park with plenty of trees around for stringing antennas.

I ended up staying at our site from 5:30PM to 2:30AM and then I went home for some sleep because I had to work Sunday.

[mtnbkr]

I don't know how we did score-wise, but we had a good time.  We had George with his satellite station (big honkin' dual antenna deal that tracked the birds as they flew over), my solar powered qrp station, the GOTA station, and a standard HF station.  Antenna-wise, we had my 122ft doublet (tuned 10m-80m), a G5RV, and a couple towers with beams, yagis, etc. 

I was going to a BBQ that night, so I couldn't operate past 6pm, but in that 4hrs, I made 15 contacts on 80m and 3 on 15m.  I could probably had made more, but our other operators were hogging 20m and 40m. :)  Still, 80m  was pretty busy for midday.

The guy running the grill did a good job and we had plenty of good burgers, hotdogs, bratwursts, and italian sausages. :)

When I got up Sunday, I operated as a 1E station from home and made 6 contacts on 40m in half an hour.  I didn't turn that in, it was just for fun.

Saturday afternoon was mostly traffic from Pa, Md, De, Ny, and so on.  Sunday, I was making contacts into Ontario.  I never heard much from the west coast.

Next year, I want to supplement my solar panel with another "green" energy source so I can reduce my dependence on the battery.  The panel provides about half the power I need.

Chris