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.
