KX4O 1B-Battery VA Field Day 2015

The 20m AHVD and 40m small loop antennas during KX4O 1B VA field day.

Despite a weak battery and few contacts, our 1B-Battery effort verifies a 40m small-loop and packet-radio NTS messaging using quick deploy antennas.

Elecraft K2 – My Favorite Field Day Station

This year our club ran 3A for the ARRL Field Day.

Radios included an Icom IC-756 Pro, TenTec Omni VII, Icom IC-746 (for the GOTA) and a Icom 7000 for VHF plus HF spare. All these radios performed quite well despite the high temperatures.

The 100 Watt Elecraft K2 stood above the others not necessarily on performance, but the elegant way the radio’s owner configured his K2, 100 Watt Amplifier and 100 Watt Matcher.

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Field Day Prep

Well Field Day 2010 all started to come together pretty well. I put all the drinks and heavy items in the front to ensure good positive tongue weight. Pre-positioned the radio on that beautiful desk. Loaded up several antennas. Three masts plus stakes, etc. I even managed to figure out how to get my hex beam in there with a minimum of dis-assembly. It is quite a mess. I am sooo glad I selected that slinky wire that does not kink.

Here is a picture.

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Field Day Lessons Learned and Future Requirements

Our Field Day in Virginia was pretty decent this year. We had plenty of visitors responding to our newspaper notice. Several folks took a turn at the Get On The Air (GOTA) station.

However, we always forget some obvious items every year.

The lessons learned from sunshine related issues are obvious. We forgot ways to shade them again this year because we got so busy with other preparation details.

Here are a few lessons learned from our Field Day written in the form of system requirements.

  1. The network routers shall be set to one fixed speed rather than auto-negotiate the speed to keep the network connections more seamless.
  2. The network routers should have their speed set to the minimum speed of 1 Mbps to provide the best sensitivity (this is plenty fast enough for the meager network needs with the N3FJP software).
  3. The network routers should have their RF output power set to below the maximum (250 mW for the Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT) if the Field Day site is hot
  4. All network nodes shall use static IP addresses.
  5. Network nodes shall not use DHCP addresses.
  6. The Network shall not use domain or host names.
  7. The radios shall be protected from direct sunshine at all times.
  8. The computers shall be protected from direct sunshine at all times.

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Digital GOTA attracts the Youth

If you are like many ARRL Field Day operations you have a Get On The Air (GOTA) station for guests.

We have done this every year I have been involved with my club’s Field Day and have had mostly good results. We usually have one Boy Scout troop stop by and make a few QSOs each. Also some technicians in our club like to operate the station during the late hours to get a chance to do SSB HF (yes we always have a control operator with valid privileges). Also it seems every year a new ham really enjoys the simplicity of the GOTA station without the concern over band sharing the other stations deal with.

Every year our GOTA is set up pretty much the same…

  • Icom 746
  • HF Antenna – Wire Dipole
  • Microphone
  • Key
  • Computer for logging
  • and that’s about it

Last year I posted observations about what the youth seem to enjoy most about our Field Day 2008…

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Alternate Power Bonus for Field Day

Bonus points are important for the annual ARRL Field Day event in June.

If you are thinking of participating in your local club’s Field Day festivities or are heading to the campground with your family for a Bravo station, bonus points are available.

One of my favorites is the Alternate Power Field Day bonus.

To quote the ARRL Field Day rules for 2009…

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Young Attracted to PSK31

During Field Day 2008 we carefully observed what operating modes the young teens did and did not enjoy while they operated. Without a doubt the digital modes, especially PSK31, got their attention.

Teenager and a younger boy sharing PSK31 contacts on an HF station.
Teenager and a younger boy sharing PSK31 contacts on an HF station.

The older of the two, KJ4FAJ, in the picture above said this when he made his first PSK31 contact just after midnight during Field Day…

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Why QSO Contest Logging and Paper don’t mix

Field Day 2008 was great for us. Our wide area wireless network worked pretty well and every station could monitor progress of the whole group.

This year we extensively used the “operator initials” field in the N3FJP Field Day Network 2.8 logging software package. Operators used their call-sign as their ‘initials’ while honored guests used their actual initials.

The site-wide log offered many great analysis possibilities. One particularly interesting metric we tracked this year was QSO rates. We generated graphs of QSO totals vs. Time Between QSOs. Here is an example of the entire log…

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