So to be honest, I didn’t think I would be able to make it to winter Field Day this year, but as chance would have it, we pulled up stakes early and came home the day before. So I went for a few hours to see if I could make a few QRP CW contacts for the guys.
The only photo I thought to take was from when I was outside operating on 15 meters.
Someone grabbed a photo of us stringing up wire antennas in the early afternoon!
This blog would be almost without photos by me as I was under a time table and didn’t think about getting photos as I was enjoying the company of the local hams that were in attendance. I was making some contacts too…albeit incorrectly for what amounted to almost the entire time. More on the lesson learned about this a little later. So, most of the images of HAMs operating are from Josh KN4RTY, fortunately he thought to take photos. I am really glad he did this and want to thank him publicly for giving me some of the photos.
Well, I went to the site at about 2:30 in the afternoon local time and talked with everyone about antenna locations and what bands everyone would start out on…as I failed to bring my band pass filters I bought JUST FOR THESE EVENTS…uggg. Anyway, once it was all settled, I strung up my 20m wire antenna into a tree as a vertical and ran out both radials for the IC705 and tuner setup on the bedcover of the truck. See photo above, as it is the only one I have.
Here we have the MFJ-496 in use and making a contact for Winter Field Day.
I also brought out a relic from the 80’s that Roger KG4WBI gave me a while back, an MFJ-496 CW Keyboard. These are as rare as hen’s teeth these days and information is even more scarce. I was fortunate and finally found the manual for it online and was able to download and print it, so I have a physical copy now. It is almost cheating when it comes to sending code as you only have to be able to type. You can program a series of memories for contesting and that is what it appears to be designed for. It will also do RTTY as well but I have not dabbled into that realm yet to see how to do it. If you are into CW and like things such as vintage HAM radio gear, this is a must have for your collection.
Here is the person (Josh KN4RTY), responsible for most of the photos, working with his daughter on making some contacts. They had a great time and I really appreciate him letting me plug into his antenna later in the evening!
Thank you Josh!
Above we have Josh’s little girl and Roger KG4WBI working SSB on an unknown machine while I was gone. Roger also stayed all night while I slept peacefully in my warm bed at home…lol. He did tell me later that he got on the air in the early morning hours and had a great run of contacts while most everyone else was asleep. I would like to point out that he is always really well prepared for this type of event and usually has enough equipment to put up a site all by himself, with multiple rigs mind you, and this is the spirit of these events. He and I also have a Ten Tec addiction as well and have plans to bring some older rigs back to life in the not too distant future. (Can we say “Tritons” anyone?) That will be epic!
One of the things I like about these events that is different from me working POTA is that it has a different theory of operation, it is to see if you can setup an emergency radio station similar to a POTA activation in that it is remote and usually battery powered. The similarities end there though. The difference is that these are not nice, serene and quiet locations, there are other radios, in close proximity, and people chatting in the background and stuff moving around, basically there is a lot of noise everywhere. It simulates the chaos of an actual emergency a little more to me with our group. We don’t setup huge contest operations, nor do we have a mobile command station (trailer) that is ready to deploy. We have a bunch of guys with radios and who are willing to help. We also know that we are still learning and we don’t criticize each other and just simply want to see if we can make a go of it. So unlike a POTA activation where I am basically all in while I am activating, here we will stop and chat about the setup or discuss the food we are bringing or what have you. It is not all about the contacts for us but more about the community.
Now on to the logging issues I ran into. Please be aware these are squarely my fault entirely as I did basically zero research before deploying to the site. So the following is on me.
I started out using the regular field day rules for our site…this was my first mistake. I used 5A for our designator and this caused a lot of problems as people kept asking for this again and again because of my error. I finally figured it out when I heard a SSB exchange and then noted the correct one on the log as you can see in the below photo. The second thing I did wrong was I used POTA rules for logging. Mainly the fact that I only captured the band and not the actual frequency. This is why I need to read the actual rules before deploying out to the site to operate for hours to come away with contacts that I cant submit. If you will notice on the second page I started noting the frequency as well…way later.
All in all, it was still a great event and we all had a wonderful time. If you want more information about field day go to the ARRL website here. Next year I will be better prepared and not make sure rookie mistakes as this…hopefully. LOL. 73 Yall.