We had a great Field Day this year. We tried out a new site along highway 88 in the Sierras and put up some new antennas. The group was smaller than usual due to calendar conflicts this year. Attendees included Mike F, Rick, Brad, Alex, Dawn, Alan, Cal, Eric and Dave. Ken went with the SBARA group, Oliver had a calendar conflict and Frank was on call and had to stick close to home. Glenn and Judy were planning to come but Judy did not feel up to it that day. Rich and Mike C wanted to come but had too much work to get away. Chris D really wanted to come also but just could not get away long enough to do so.
We had some new equipment to try out this year. Alan brought a Spiderbeam (actually finished building it), Mike F built a 40 meter double extended Zepp, and Cal brought a “new” trailer. Mike F’s Icom Pro III was also new. Eric had a new digital mode interface – the “Navigator”, and a new Icom 7000 rig set up in his trailer, a very clean and comfortable station, and he probably set a new group record for digital contacts on Field Day. He used an AH-4 autotuner and an L type antenna launched into the trees.
Mike’s double extended Zepp worked very well. He was greeted with an immediate pileup on 40 meters as soon as he turned on Saturday, and he worked a lot of stations. Alan’s Spiderbeam worked well on 20 meters, though it is suspected that one or more of the wire elements are not cut properly since the SWR on 17 and 15 were not up to spec.
The pnemuatic launchers worked well, and were used to put the beam up between two trees, as well as the wire antennas.
Alan brought a TGElectronics dc voltage booster for his station (Icom Pro III, TenTec Hercules amplifier, Spiderbeam). The ProIII does not seem to be sensitive to the voltage, so it may not be required, but it worked well and did not generate noise in the receiver. The DC was provided by a pair of 100AH Dynasty AGM batteries in parallel, and charged by a Progressive Dynamics 60A RV power supply and a Honda EU2000is generator. In the past this power system has not generated noise, however in this setup some noise was noted, and more work needs to be done on this.
Cal used some vertical antennas and a TS480 and made quite a few contacts.
Dave brought his great callsign that we used (W6PS, or W6 Power Supply) and some excellent operating skills. He also brought some radio gear but there was so much gear already set up he didn’t unpack it.
Rick returned after a long absence from our FD expeditions, and logged a lot of stations.
Alex and Brad teamed up and made a batch of contacts all over the country, and a few foreign stations as well. Alex had a good introduction to Ham Radio.
We used a WiFi network and FDLog to do the logging. The software worked fine, but we did have a few glitches with the WiFi network. Make sure to set the DNS leases short (5 minutes) and provide battery backed up power to the WiFi router to reduce the problems associated with the network bouncing up and down. Next year we will move to LinkSys WRT54G type routers running DD-WRT, and have several configured the same for backup, plus DC power and good antennas.
We had a great BBQ saturday night and swapped old and new stories, taking a break from the bands.
Thanks to all and we had a great time. Looking forward to next year!
73
AlanB