High Sierra Field Day Group

This post is a bit late, as Field Day 2014 was over a month ago. We just put our scores into the ARRL database. Propagation was good. The only problem we suffered this year was some participant cancellations over concerns about dust at the site. We were sharing the camping site with a construction project, but they were very helpful and there was no problem from them or their use of the site.

Hope you had a great Field Day too.

The new FDLog GPS USB Clock worked well, keeping our clocks synchronized more accurately than the old GPS setup which no longer works well due to Microsoft’s policy changes about time setting by programs.

The FDLog GPS USB Clock interpolates time from GPS satellites to the millisecond and reports it to the FDLog software when queried. FDLog has been updated to use this more accurate time and more aggressively set the time in the synchronized FDLog programs. It does not set system time, but it does keep track of the offset in the database so rebooting/restarting nodes come back on-time. 🙂

73, Alan, W6AKB

Time zooms by when you’re busy having fun. Hopefully we will have a good Field Day this year. With fire danger, and construction in the Sierras we may have some special excitement. Hope to see you on the air!

— AlanB, w6akb

Has it been a year already? Last year’s Field Day flew by so fast we didn’t even make a blog entry here! But we did have a nice Field Day, even though another group used our site so we went to a backup site.

Well, the velocity of time is still (apparently) increasing, but we are preparing for Field Day again. The FDLog software is being updated (more on the FDLog website).

Overdue for a new posting here. Field Day 2011 was a good one, though we had some problems. The snow levels precluded using our usual site, so we went further south at lower elevation. This caused some group members to drop out due to the extra commuting distance and time, and we had a small group this year already, so that made it smaller.

The website has been upgraded after some files were damaged.

We are back from Field Day 2010. We had a good time and about 15 people participated in our FD group event. We put up Mike’s quadruple extended zepp again and it rocked on 40 and 80 meters. Eric brought out his new trailer. Frank did digital mode this year and learned a great deal. Robert was able to snag a couple of satellite Q’s. My Spiderbeam took awhile to reassemble but worked well on 20 and 15. Cal ran a HiQ tuna Dipole. Rigs included a pair of IC 756 Pro III’s, FT 100, TS 480, IC 706, a couple of K3’s, IC 7000, FT 857, SDR 3000 and a few I didn’t list. We had limited internet access via Frank’s EDGE AT&T Junxion box wireless hotspot. FDLog handled the logging with many laptops operating synchronized via wireless. Power came from various batteries and mostly Honda generators including 650, 1000, 2000 and 3000. The Honda EU3000is was amazingly easy to pull start (the battery was dead).

Field Day is about testing equipment and we tested more than ever before. This included radios, generators, batteries, power supplies, and Antenna Launchers. Franks newly contructed old kit worked well, as did the regulars including Eric’s soda bottle chamber linear and my CSV17. I tested a new prototype piston valve 17 inch launcher that has great performance.

Prototype PV17 Launcher at FD 2010

Photo by Dave Bermann W6PS