field operation – Page 15

CE3/AI4SV

I was in Chile this week for a conference on clinical trials in Latin America. I delivered about five talks in three days, but also managed to carve out a few hours to meet with the Radio Club of Chile — more about that in a subsequent post. Today, I had a few hours free before the flight out and decided to explore the city a little before the taxi to the airport would arrive at the hotel.

I had charged the QRP gear during the conference, and I even had an external 2Ah lead acid battery. This time, TSA had decided that it was permitted to take it on the plane. Maybe it helped to label everything I was carrying as “sealed, unspillable, non-spillable, absorbed glass mat, lead-acid battery” and “not lithium”. I even went so far as to write “this is a wheelchair” on my bag, since I know that lead-acid batteries are explicitly permitted in the cabin when the are “part of a wheelchair.”

I headed for the metro system and took the red line from Los Leones to Banqueda, which is just south of the furnicular that runs up the side of Santiago Hill to Santiago Municipal Park. The furnicular has a plaque that advertises that it is the same train that Pope John Paul II took to the top during his trip here. Well, if it’s good enough for the pope…

The furnicular ran smoothly, and we passed the zoological park on the way up. The top of the line is a plaza, which was full of bicyclers, who were taking advantage of the great Spring weather. I exercised some restraint and did not follow the signs pointing “this way to the virgin”, but continued along the trail, towards the antennas that run along the ridge. The biking trail run along the side of the mountain, and followed it for a bit, then turned towards higher ground on dirt trails. I walked to the very top and checked out the antennas, but decided I really didn’t want to pitch my wire antenna anywhere near them.

I continued on a bit more to the East and found a nice place to plunk down on the side of a hill.

The furnicular parked at the top of the track.

I decided to go with a 15m antenna plus my SLT+ tuner. I pitched the wire into a tree and threw the counterpoise down the hill on the pine needles. I got everything else set up, turned on the radio, and didn’t hear much. The background was just not right. I tried tuning the antenna starting with the suggested inductor setting, but the little red light didn’t change at all. I gave the SLT+ a couple knocks to see if anything was loose, and heard an occasional burst of static.

Of course, I didn’t have tools with me. I almost threw some into the bag, but recalling previous run-ins with TSA, I decided against it. I was, however, able to rip the pocket clip off my pen and use that as a screw driver to open the SLT+. I had suspected that the toroids might have come loose, but when I opened it, I saw that I had already addressed that after the last incident — all were firmly anchored with hot glue. What had happened was that the red antenna banana terminal’s solder lug had rotated and was grounded. I twisted it around, and the noise level went up. As I tuned around, I started hearing signals.

But, my troubles with the SLT+ weren’t over. When I tried to run the antenna this time, the capacitor knob spun freely. If I recall, it had been attached to the underlying polyvaricon shaft with either glue or nail polish. I tried to turn the capacitor from the side using the jaws of an alligator clip, but found it very difficult to do so. I had little choice but to settle for the best match I could get using the inductors, although the loudest settings didn’t correspond well to the suggested settings. I decided to go by the SWR reading on the radio itself. My “feedline” was a piece of BNC-terminated coax only about a half meter long, so as long as the radio could tolerate the impedance mismatch, I figured I’d be okay. I did push the radio when it read “high vSWR”, but was willing to transmit with a few bars on the swr meter. Being less picky let me transmit on both 10m and 15m; it seemed to work on both. The moral of this story: always throw a leatherman into the checked baggage. It may get stolen, but most of the time it won’t.

field_screw_driver — The broken-off pocket clip from a ballpoint pen served [poorly] as a phillips head screwdriver.

I was extremely relieved when I heard PY1XM, Tom, come back to me on 10m. Up to that point, I thought that I might be skunked on this outing, with nothing to show for hauling my equipment half a world away and up a mountain. Tom was operating from Rio, which is about 3000 km from Santiago. Right after working him, I talked with Paulo, PR2W operating from Brasilia. Paulo gave me a 579, so I was glad that my signal was not entirely in the mud, although I’m sure his antenna did the heavy lifting.

While listening down the band, I heard an Italian station calling — he was pretty faint, so I though I would have no chance, but I could hear another station calling nearby. The more I spun the dial, the louder it became. It was slow but sure, and I had to hear it a few times because I was not familiar with the structure of the call sign: CD6792. After one exchange, I found out that it was Álvaro, a member of the Radio Club of Chile that I had met the previous day. ¡Fine business, Álvaro!

The view from my operating position on the side of a hill.

I had two more contacts: LU8WX in Argentina was rapid-firing DX contacts, and he got didn’t miss a beat in replying to my unusually long call. I also found that I could also get a reasonable match on 15m, so my final contact was with Rei, PY2VJ in Brazil.

So, five contacts isn’t anything to gloat about, but considering that Murphy accompanied me up the mountain, I was happy to have had even one. It seemed that conditions were getting better as the day went along, so propagation may also have played some role. I’ll note that the previous day, the K index had gone up to 4, and when I was operating it, it was declining, but still about 2.

The 2nd Annual Skeeter Hunt

IMG_20130811_161053

A few weeks after the Flight of the Bumblebees, and I was ready for the Second Annual Skeeter Hunt coordinated by Larry, W2LJ. I had registered as operating from Virginia, but the evening before the event I looked over the list of participants and realized that there were already plenty of stations operating from VA. Likewise, West Virginia and Maryland had some coverage, but Delaware had no skeeters. I remember that in getting my WAS-50 on LOTW, I had a hard time with Delaware. It’s a small state, there are a limited number of hams, and it seemed that not many used LOTW. So, I figured I’d give Delaware some coverage. Like the FOBB, I opted for a coastal location, this time Fenwick Island State Park.

The other motivation to drive to Delaware was that I had to cross through a lot of Maryland, allowing me to participate in the Maryland-DC QSO Party using the car radio. I didn’t have the log computer along, so I jotted my log on a pad as I went along and only operated voice. I had some nice strings where I worked the same stations from multiple Maryland counties.

I had scoped out Fenwick Island State Park on Google Earth, so I had some idea where I was going. After paying the somewhat punitive-feeling out of state price to park (eight bucks! Oh well, I’m here now…), I followed the beach goers seaward, hauling a radio bag and a wrist-rocket tennis ball launcher. After reconnoitering the beach, I found that the “stand of trees” that I had seen on Google satellite view was a bunch of bushes about three feet tall. I hiked back to the car, got a telescoping mast, and tied it to a log that had been piled into the sand in front of a dune. As in the FOBB, I set up a 20m “untangleable dipole” and got to work.

I immediately worked a bunch of stations S&P, but had less success calling. As the afternoon went along, I heard more and more WAE stations in the QRP area. While I have a sharp audio filter on the 817, the front end is wide open. I had held off on working the WAE stations, but was pleased to hear F5NBU responding not with a WAE exchange, but “599 5W”. I realize now that my strategy should have been to work more of the WAE stations (and that I should get an RF filter for the 817). Also, although I like the dipole, I might have been better served by lofting the 40m EFHW with tuner. In any event, I had a great time and as a side benefit, had the opportunity to explain ham radio to a bunch of curious beach goers. One guy asked me,

“Did you need to get special permission to put that [the antenna] up?”. I replied, “No. It’s just like a very tall beach umbrella, without the umbrella part.”

Aside from the usual radio operating skills, two others came into play: 1) working the radio while explaining what I was doing to curious beachgoers; and 2) managing not to get sand in everything.

The bottom line: I worked 18 other skeeters, plus 3 non-skeeters in thirteen states plus Ontario. My two DX contacts were France and Poland. While I had a number of homebrew components in the station (the antenna, the audio filter, etc.), the main rig was commercial, so I took the “3x” multiplier for field operation.

FOBB 2013

While on vacation on the beach in Montauk, New York, I took part in this year’s Flight of the Bumblebees, a QRP event in which portable stations receive a bumblebee number in advance of the event, and work home stations and each other during a four hour period. I wasn’t sure that I’d have time to play radio this weekend, as this was a family outing, but by the Sunday of the event, the family had enough sun and sand, and I was able to drive to Camp Hero to set up my station.

This is about the best location that I could ask for: the very tip of Long Island: surrounded on three sides by salt water, no neighbors or noisy interference (except occasional low-flying planes and helicopters), and a flat plane in all directions. Camp Hero is a former US Air Force Base, but is now a New York State Park. It is a little less traveled than the rest of Montauk as there is a small cover fee to enter the park, and there is no beach. The park is surrounded by cliffs with warnings that the edges may be undermined and that people should keep back from them.

When I got to the parking lot on the Atlantic side of the park, I took it as a good sign that a giant (now inactive) radar dish was keeping watch over my site. I struck on foot to the NE along a path that parallels the cliffs. It was tempting to set up on what must have been a missile placement, but I kept going, past various bushes until I came to an area that had a conveniently placed wood fence. In the distance, the Montauk lighthouse alternately faded and resolidified in the mist.

I managed to carry in everything in one trip: a push up mast, antenna, radios, chair, operating table, batteries, water, etc. Earlier this year, when W7SUA moved to Arizona, I had purchased a push-up mast from him, and that mast was used to support the center of the “untangleable folded dipole” that I had made earlier this year for the W5O operation at the QRPTTF event. I attached the mast about six feed down because the top gets pretty thin and I wasn’t keen to guy the pole. In fact, I got away with duct taping the pole to the fence at two points and called it a day. I tied down the two ends of the folded dipole to form an inverted V. The antenna had given me about 1:1 swr when flat topped at QRPTTF, and it did likewise in this configuration — which is good, since I didn’t bring a tuner.

I set up the FT817nd using a 2Ah battery as a support and a 7Ah battery as a back-stop. As usual, the palm paddle key mounted magnetically on the 817. Since the 817 is wide as a barn, with no roof filter, I ran the speaker output through my recently built switched capacitor audio filter based on the New England QRP Club’s NESCAF design. I cranked the filter over to “narrow” and peaked it on my side tone. After that, the filter made all the difference in the world in pulling out close-in signals. Thankfully, there were no other major contests that weekend except the NJQP, which was inside the skip zone, so front-end overload was not an issue.

I slathered myself in sun block, downed a liter of water and settled in about half an hour before the event. I had a test QSO with with Mark, K4NC, who said that he was also getting ready to try QRP in the FOBB. I wished him luck and was glad to work him again a few hours later during the contest proper.

In four hours, I logged 69 contacts, although three were duplicates. It may be that those stations didn’t copy all my info on the first pass or that like me they were logging by hand in a notebook, so I happily worked them a second time. Of the 66 stations worked, 40 were fellow bumblebees. I noted that a couple stations were on the event listing as bumblebees, but gave their power in the exchange, so I assume that they were folks that had planned to get into the field, but had to work as a home station on the day of the event, likely due to weather. Contacts included 27 US States, including all three continental west coast states. In Canada, I had two contacts to Ontario, and my best DX was with France grâce à F6BZG. Most of the non-bumblebee stations sent 5W, and the lowest power in my log was 2W K4MU and 3W AA7EQ.

20 meters yielded a fairly steady rate, and having carried in 9Ah worth of battery, I was not adverse to calling CQ all afternoon. I had a couple lulls, but was happy enough with 20 meters that I didn’t feel compelled to dig into my bag for the 15 meter end-fed that I had also brought along. Twenty seemed to be in good shape all afternoon.

I worked W7CNL‘s 4W station from Idaho just under the wire at the conclusion of the contest – this was a 339/339 exchange, and we were both struggling as the clock counted down. Thanks, W7CNL for hanging in there! FOBB was a FB event.

FD 2013

Once again, the Vienna Wireless Society participated in ARRL Field Day from Burke Lake Park in Northern Virginia. For the last three years, I have captained the non-40m CW tent. The plan this year was slightly updated to move the stations closer together, while maintaining adequate antenna spacing.

I had a few secret weapons this year. First, with the move up the hill, I was close to the spider beam mount that I was able to use it to work 20 meters, and for a bit of the contest, 10 meters. The 40m station typically runs 15 meters, so I did not use the beam on that band. When the spider beam went up, I also tacked on an AO-50 omnidirectional 6 meter antenna, so we picked up a few contacts on that band as well, but far fewer than I had hoped. The other trick I had up my sleeve was to roll out a newly minted K3 rig. I had put it together about two weeks back, just in time to test it out in the NAQCC sprint for May. In addition to the stock 2.7 kHz roofing filter, the K3 has 200 and 400 Hz roofing filters for CW.

As for weather, we enjoyed both heat and humidity on Saturday and were surprised by chilling, drenching thunderstorm on Sunday. Good times.

I’ve stopped hearing CW in my car creaks and the howling of my home’s air ducts, but my brain is still not entirely recovered from the continuous operation of the station over that 24 hour period. Thanks to Leon, NT8B, I did catch some sleep during the event, otherwise I would be even more posty-toasty.

Some preliminary results (some contacts logged separately, e.g., our VHF activity, also all of the added point categories like GOTA, solar power, etc., are not included):

Band	Mode	QSOs	Pts
1.8	LSB	3	3
3.5	CW	185	370
3.5	LSB	66	66
7	CW	424	848
7	LSB	477	477
14	CW	376	752
14	USB	45	45
21	CW	34	68
21	USB	121	121
28	CW	38	76
28	USB	27	27
50	CW	3	6
TL	Both	1799	2859

Things that were planned and worked out well:

Rain gear: Packed a poncho and umbrella despite a clear forecast. Similarly, packed long sleeve shirts and a sweater despite heat and humidity in the 90s.
Trash bags: Plastic bags enabled us to keep the station up, even when sideways rain was splashing through the mesh sides of our operating tent
Plastic sheeting stashed in the club’s field day bucket, someone years back had thought to buy some large plastic sheets. Not long after rain started, John Righi realized that he could drape our tent with the sheets to keep water out.
The spider beam: It is a pain to put up, but works well.
N1MM: Prior planning and testing with N1MM lead to a smooth operation
Poison Ivy on the main antenna support tree: Recognized, avoided.
Food: Yummy, and plenty of it.

Things that did not go entirely according to plan:

The deep-dwelling ground rod: An 8-foot ground rod, hammered in 4 feet deep proved difficult to extract. With many helpers, a hydraulic jack, a vise grip to provide purchase on the rod, and a thick wood log to increase surface area under the jack, the rod was recovered, averting plan B, which involved a hack saw.
The tree-loving guy line: one of the supports for the 80m dipole was particularly long, and an overlooked knot in the end became fouled on a high tree branch. Pulling only lead to comical moonbouncing around on the lawn. The solution: tying the line to a pick up truck and running for cover. The 3/8″ line held, a tree branch came down, and the problem was considered solved.
The logging computer, an old Panasonic Toughbook, decided that its track pad would no longer function when we set it up at the station. The touch screen still worked, so we weren’t entirely out of luck, but we had to scramble a bit to find an external mouse. I’m still not sure what happened, as the pad had worked right through the WVQP a week ago, and up to the previous evening when I was setting up the database for field day.
It turned out that we did not have a satellite station for field day, so between HF stints, Ben Gelb and I monitored satelite passes and attempted to jury rig a station from my car, which is outfitted with a computer controlled TS-2000. Ben was at least familiar with the software, whereas I was reading the TS2000 manual right up to the first pass. We had a 70cm yagi, the car’s 70cm/2m vertical, and a small 70cm magmount antenna. We ran HRD’s satellite tracking program, and set up a waterfall using Ben’s digicube dongle, while the TS2000 provided duplex audio for both up and downlink. We did manage to find the satellites each time, but had some difficulty setting the T/R offset and tuning around in real time during the pass. We heard both CW and SSB transmissions on the birds, and even succeeded in hearing our own CW signal, so at least we knew that we were making it in. This set up may have worked on a quieter day, and I think it needs only a bit of tweaking to get it right…maybe next year, with some practice in between.

Things to consider for next year:

We worked absolutely everyone that we heard and were often the first station through pile-ups. Maybe we could go entirely QRP next year? Bigger score multiplier, less inter-station interference
Check that we have plastic sheeting for every operating position.
Check wireless routers for RF emission. I’m not sure this was a problem, but something blanked out our satellite receive capability on one pass, and having eliminated other sources, we suspect a wifi router may have been the culprit.

Operation Rolling Pork

P5042730

In 2011, I got together with Ben (NN9S) and Tymme (K9TYM), and we participated in the Indiana QSO Party from Tymme’s house, just outside Bloomington, Indiana. None of us were experienced contest operators, but we managed to set up a multi-multi station in short order and kept it on the air for the duration of the event, giving out QSOs for Monroe County.

We couldn’t pull the team together last year because of jobs and travel schedules, but we entered this year as a Rover team. My 2009 Hyundai Sonata is outfitted with a Kenwood B2000, similar to the TS-2000, but without a front panel. The main radio unit is housed in the trunk, with a remote head mounted on the dash.

Over the last year, I’ve gradually modified the car for this operation, with power connectors running down the left electrical channel to the trunk, and audio, keying, RS-232 and antenna control cables running along the right electrical channel. One of the radio’s antenna ports is dedicated to a 2m/70cm antenna, while the other is used for HF: either a screw driver antenna or MFJ hamsticks.

I took a few days off of work for the event and camped on the way out and back to Indiana from Virginia. Before leaving, I lightened up the car a bit by removing the passenger side seat. The seat is held down by four bolts, easily removable with a socket wrench, plus some electrical cables that had to be disconnected. In place of the seat, I screwed in a RAM Mount for my panasonic toughbook laptop, with power from the car’s accessory power port and rig control via RS-232. This allowed the computer to be operated from either the driver position or the rear seat. Similarly, the microphone reached to the rear seat.

Either passenger in the back could operate the microphone, and the passenger behind the driver typically also fulfilled the role of navigator. The other passenger in the rear seat operated the computer, and the driver either drove, or while parked, operated CW using paddles mounted on the center console behind the shift lever. An autokeyer with rate adjustment was installed into the front dash.

We followed a counter-clockwise loop, starting near Tymme’s house in Monroe county. Our plan was to aim for county borders that were along an efficient route. In the weeks before the event, we roughed out a plan using Google Maps and Street View to try to find places that would be safe to pull over and operate and ideally far from sources of electrical interference. We also tried to find locations with some elevation and good prospects for pitching an antenna into a tree or setting up a support pole.

Our signboard reminds us that we are parked at the Monroe/Lawrence county border.

We got off to a wobbly start because we did not make good time from Chicago to Bloomington, and we got a little turned around in Bloomington. Consequently, when the contest started, we were still on the way to Tymme’s house. This wasn’t a major set back, as we just started operating mobile on voice until we got there. As soon as we pulled it, storm clouds were gathering, and the decision was made to shoot the 80m antenna for the evening’s operations before the sky let loose. While Ben and Tymme disappeared into the woods to shoot strings into trees, I operated CW from Tymme’s driveway.

Before long, we were underway, first way point: the Monroe/Lawrence border. Our circuit continued with operations in Orange, Dubois, Martin, Washington, Scott, and Jackson counties. We had surprisingly few contacts in Martin country, which I thought would be a highly sought location, and I’m not sure why — we had a remote, high location; maybe propagation was just off at that point in the day.

As the first person to operate phone when we got to the Orange/Dubois border, I learned that “Dubois” isn’t pronounced the way I thought I was. In Indiana, it rhymes with “noise” rather than “quoi”.

P5042727 — Ben and Jack pose with the Porkmobile and the trunk-mounted screw driver antenna in front of a genre-appropriate restaurant

We continued operating the entire duration of the contest, driving through pouring rain for the last few hours. The rate began to drop off in the evening, a reflection of the poor efficiency of mobile antennas on the lower bands. Looking at the clock and the map, we reckoned that we would need to get back to Monroe country quickly if we wanted to have a chance to use the 80m full-length dipole that we had spent some time setting up earlier in the day. We nicked Brown county on the way back to Tymme’s, but unfortunately didn’t land any QSOs. In retrospect, I think we should have written off getting back and tried to get a couple contacts in Brown country, but we were also constrained by our over all travel plans — we had to be back in Chicago by 6 am the next morning, so we were keen to get back to Tymme’s by midnight and catch a few hours of sleep.

Tymme took the wheel for the last hour or two of the contest, flying through Indiana back roads like Luke Skywalker in the trenches of the version 1.0 deathstar. I’m pretty sure Tymme turned off the targeting computer and just followed his instincts home. Surprisingly (to me), when we got to Tymme’s house, he didn’t stop driving, even though the driveway had run out. Tymme continued to sail over lawn and into the forest behind his house, with the car slicing through waist-high grass. He stopped when he got to the tree supporting the 80m dipole and we hooked up the feed line to the radio in the car’s trunk.

Tymme operating phone from the back seat

Aside from some boozy yokels on 75m, we didn’t hear much activity, but once we started calling CQ, we had a pile up of responses. When we had wrung out sideband, we switched down to CW and a similar hot run. In the last half hour of the contest, I was pleased to work many calls that I recognized as QRP stations.

During the 12 hour event, we reckon that we worked 30 states/provinces and 48 sections. This is actually fewer states than we had worked in 2011. I believe that this could be improved in future efforts if we used higher antennas and paid more attention to the 7Q contest. Here is the breakdown by band and mode:

band mode qsos pts mults

3.5 cw 33 66 8

3.5 lsb 24 24 6

7 cw 135 270 47

7 lsb 127 127 44

14 cw 12 24 5

14 usb 13 13 8

21 cw 2 4 0

total 346 528 118

score: 62,304

Doing some quick calculations after the contest, it appears that Ben has now achieved the first rank of “worked all Indiana” between Operations Sizzling Pork and Rolling Pork.

On the way home, I attached the 10m MFJ hamstick to the trunk mount and worked CW. Conditions were great, with solar flux up around 150. I logged QSOs to the following countries: Honduras, Nicaragua, Argentina, Cuba, Guadeloupe, Brazil, Canary Islands, Mexico, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, the Balearic Islands, and South Africa.

This year, we had some nice mini-pileups, which made it an exciting event. After getting back to Virginia, I called up records from dxsummit to see if and when we were spotted (thanks, by the way, to everyone who did spot us). I would have guessed that we had been spotted at some additional times, so maybe this records isn’t all-inclusive of spots, or perhaps people are just good at finding fresh stations to work:

N9IO  3530.0 NN9S inqp      0347 05 May   United States
K3CT  7225.0 NN9S QSO Party 0012 05 May   United States
KB9NW 7244.9 NN9S           2244 04 May   United States

I hope we are able to build on our effort in INQP 2014. The first item on the plan for INQP 2014 will be operation from Brown County.

QRP TTF 2013

For the 50th anniversary of the Vienna Wireless Society, the club operated under a special event call sign: W5O. As usual, there was a good turn out of club members for both the picnic and on-air activities. We put a couple rockmites, FT817s, and a KX3 on the air, and accumulated 62 contacts in our log in total running predominantly CW, but some phone as well. We had multiple contacts with other operators also participating in the QRP TTF, but also the Florida QSO Party, and one SOTA station. In the next couple weeks, we should send out our QSL cards to confirm the contacts.

In the days before the event, I put together an “untangleable folded dipole” antenna made from 300 ohm twinlead, plus a matching box comprised of two toroids and two capacitors. The antenna was based on a design found on the blog of KI6SN, and I summarized the construction details for my effort on a Google-plus post.

After spudgunning two trees, we hoisted the folded dipole to a flat 40-foot deployment. The feed line is about 25 feet, so a short BNC-terminated coax extension was used. The antenna worked great and allowed us to work a Swiss station, and to score reverse beacon hits throughout Europe on 20m. I swept the antenna with a MFJ analyzer at the end of the event, and noted that SWR was below 1.2 for the entire CW portion of the band, and less than 2 from below 20m to above the voice portion of the band. So, quite impressed with the folded dipole design. As advertised, it packed up easily and without tangling.

VAQP 2013

VAQP 2013 didn’t go quite the way I’d imagined it would, but it was still fun. Getting N1MM set up the night before the event, I was surprised to see fields for an exchange number. I’m pretty sure this was a new feature, and I’m not sure how popular it will be with people who prefer more casual operation in state QSO parties.

The contest ran from 10 am to 10 pm on Saturday and 8 am to 8 pm on Sunday. I spent Saturday with the Vienna Wireless Society, operating from the Annandale Swim Club. We got to the club at 9 am and it was probably unrealistic to think that we’d have antennas up, rigs configured, and N1MM networked by 10 am.

We had some technical difficulties — our spud gun line broke a few times, the reels jammed, and trees claimed a lot of line and a few spuds. At one point, while I was working on another antenna placement, I noticed the other antenna hanging team trying to get one of our fouled lines out of a tree using the tools at hand: a lifeguard chair and a pool net.

It took a couple hours to get the antennas deployed. With the contest starting at 10 am, we started operating from the parking lot. I popped the tarheel antenna on my car, tuned to 40 meters, and Kevin WB0POH began working stations. By the time we had the indoor stations set up and configured, he had worked fifty contacts, including the bonus station, K4NVA. I think all his contacts were CW, so worth twice the points to boot.

I’m not sure why, but we were not able to get the two logging computers to talk to each other. We tied them both into the club’s router, which should have worked like a hub. Both computers received DHCP addresses, and as far as I could tell, could see each other on the network. Not wanting to waste any more time, I set up the voice station to start with an exchange number of 500, while the CW station continued to build on Kevin’s earlier contacts. I’m sure hearing our SSB exchanges in the 500 range early in the day put the fear of god into our more competitive neighboring clubs. Heh.

The CW station was set up in a different room from the SSB station, and we had a counter and some stools as operating space. After sitting for a while, I got rid of the stool and used the counter as a standing desk. It felt good to dance around while working CW, and I think I might try for this sort of set up in the future as it keeps the blood flowing. Ian, N0IMB, took some video of TS-450 I was using. Unfortunately, the video does not capture my dance moves. You can’t hear the dits and dahs on the video because I’m wearing headphones.

We broke down our field stations and took down the antennas on Saturday night. The next morning, I set the home station up again. I had brought a number of station items to the field, so I had a little rewiring to do before I could get on the air Sunday morning at around 11 am. I worked intermittently until the end of the contest at 8pm that evening, but had a number of fairly large breaks to take care of family, do chores, etc. I entered as single-op, all bands, low power (100W), CW-only, non-assisted, one radio.

Propagation was so-so, and I kept hoping that after a break, it would improve. It wasn’t just my imagination: conditions were much better on Saturday. Looking at the space weather data, a CME thrown on Friday hit the ionosphere Sunday morning, just when I was starting operation. The K-index bumped up to five and stayed there the rest of the day. Conditions did seem to improve as the day went on, but this perception may also be a matter of more people joining the contest for the last few hours.

I spent almost all of my time on 40m, using the attic dipole rather than the outside 40m vertical that does better in DX contests. I had good coverage of New England earlier in the day, and worked westward into Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Arkansas. Operating NVIS, I had a reasonable chance of operating other VA stations, including VWS club member Kevin, WB0POH.

Twenty meters was not as helpful as I’d have liked — at one point, Europe opened somewhat, and I worked a succession of stations in Poland, Germany and the Slovak Republic. Later in the day, I had a brief opening to the west coast: WA, OR, and CA. Otherwise, 20m was my direct line to Florida. I did reach two stations on ten meters, but probably ground wave.

In the last hour and a half, I did good business on 80m, where I mostly ran into stations that I had worked on other bands.

I was surprised in the contest how many times I was called by stations that I had already worked. As a matter of course, I worked them again. Maybe conditions were marginal on some of those calls, and maybe they just wanted an insurance contact. I didn’t hear anyone else operating from Fairfax City (FXX) — at least not on CW — so maybe my exchange was in high demand.

My final tally was 166 contacts (some dupes), with a paltry 26 Virginia City/County, 23 State/Province, and 3 DX entities. If I calculated correctly, I may have nosed over 20,000 points. Not a great performance, but not too bad considering time and conditions.

As for the club log, I’ll have to more or less manually merge the databases from the two workstations that we used into one file for submission to the Sterling Club which runs the VAQP.

Field Day CW Totals

We’re still assembling the total number of contacts from FD 2012 because the SSB and CW stations were not networked, but here are the totals for the two CW stations. I’d say we hit our goals and then some.

The 80/20/10 station

Mhz	Contacts
3.5	279
7	304
21	15
Total	599

The 40/15 station

Mhz	Contacts
7	430
21	115
28	4
50	1
Total	550

So, our CW total for the event was 1159 contacts. The results from the SSB, VHF/satellite, and GOTA stations and all bonus points should be out soon.

Field Day 2012

logging8020 — Ray, K2HYD at the operating position of the 80/20/10 tent. Hap, K7HAP is at the second position on the laptop, and Byron, W4SSY, supervises

To make everyone’s life easier, we stuck mostly to the plan developed for last year’s event, although I made some effort to simplify the set up where possible. This year, the main rig was a TenTec Omni VII, a radio with clearly marked controls and big tuning knob. Most people could sit down at this rig and be on the air in a matter of minutes without reference to reading material, nifty or otherwise. Instead of three antennas, we went with two: a moxon for westward gain on 20 meters, and a G5RV for all band coverage. The Omni had no difficulty tuning the G5RV for any band that we tried (10, 15, 20, 40, 80).

One major difference from last year is that we did not shut down in the wee morning hours. Both of the CW stations pounded brass for the entire 24 hour period of the contest. We had more operators than the previous year and divided the shifts carefully to assure that at least one person would be at the key all the time. It also helped that several of us brought our own tents this year for quick cat naps. We were all a bit punchy by Sunday morning, but after several cups of coffee, we powered through the rest of the event.

The CW tent is near a busy intersection and more accessible to other parts of the park, so we had a number of visitors drop by the 80/20 tent. Some of these visitors turned out to be hams eager to put their hands on the paddles, and a few of them racked up an impressive list of contacts and we made sure to invite them back for next year. The more operators we have, the more pleasant staffing becomes. We might even be able to put someone on VHF CW for part of field day next year.

twilight — The 20 meter moxon (left) and G5RV (right) supported by a 40 foot military push-up mast, guyed at 3 levels.

Our computer wasn’t fully networked in at the start of the contest, so I don’t know how all the stations did. I have fuzzy recollection that we had around three hundred contacts on 20m and another 300 or so on 80m. We also worked on 15m for a while on Saturday evening, when the 40/15 station had gone to 40m and our 20m operation had been interfering with the SSB 20m station. I’m eager to see the final numbers after all the logs are merged.

One item to consider for next year — is it time to bring an SDR radio to field day? Would a graphic view of the whole band give us an advantage? Would a Flex radio (or other similar radio) play well with the other radios? I like the feel of a big tuning knob and I am used to zipping up and down the band by ear, but that’s all a matter of habit, and if there is better technology, we should consider it. Maybe it would be worth a test drive at some other event before field day 2013.

June mW Sprint

I was sent on fairly short notice to attend a meeting at Lake Tahoe, which is just south of Reno along the California/Nevada border. I had one free evening before the conference, and it just happened to fall on the date of an NAQCC Sprint. I gave serious thought to throwing a wire out the hotel window, but the surrounding mountains called to me. This was not the usual monthly sprint, but the milliwatt version, so I figured that I needed all the help I could get and wanted to take advantage of the elevation.

After some quality time with Google Maps, it looked like Mount Rose was the highest accessible peak in the area. There is a parking lot near the trails that lead to the top of the mountain, but I didn’t think a business suit and dress shoes would fair very well on the gravely slopes. Across the road from the park lot is a campground with picnic tables and tall trees: the ingredients for comfortable field operations. In principle, there is a trail that runs up from the campground to Mount Slide, which, like Mount Rose is a SOTA peak. Again, if I had the right clothing and gear I might have attempted it, but it just wasn’t going to happen this trip. I settled for the 9000+ foot elevation of the campsite.

I tossed a water bottle with a string into a tree, fired up the FT817nd on internal batteries and tuned up with the Hendricks SLT tuner. Before the Sprint, I worked WW0SS in Minnesota on 2.5W. Everything went faster than I had planned, so I laid down on the picnic bench and basked for a while.

I started searching around just a bit before the sprint to get a sense of band conditions. When the sprint started, I alternated between searching and calling. A number of local signals masked the sprint stations for a while, particularly with the poor selectivity of the ft817 (without a filter). I heard quite a few, some of whom were operating at 5W, while others were true milliwatt (less than 1W) stations.

I kept the rig at 0.5W for the entire event, and although I had two small lead acid batteries in the radio bag, I never had to use them. The 817 was running on fumes by the end of the sprint, but I was glad to see that it could make it through two hours of minimal power operation that had included a lot of calling.

All in all, I had six qsos on 20 and 40m. I reported 5 on the NAQCC sprint page because I wasn’t sure the last qso was complete, but I heard afterwards by email from the other station and confirmed that he had, in fact, correctly copied by call at the end of the contest. I think we gave each others 339 for that contact, and I recall that we needed a lot of repeats due to a mixture of summer weather background sounds, QSB and neighboring signals.

I didn’t come close to winning the sprint or even my category, but I enjoyed the scenery and the chance to sign myself as AI4SV/7.