Field Day AAR
Our club’s designation was 5A and our location was EPA (Eastern Pennsylvania).
We met as a group to put up ten messenger lines for the antennas on Tuesday June 20. We launched the lines using the club’s Presidents potato gun. It was a potato gun that had a mortar type shell using pressured air, not a propellant. Sixty pounds seemed to be the perfect pressure for our purpose.
Saturday June 23rd found my team at the field day grounds at 1000 hrs. My team was made up of one 13-year old General License holder and his friend, both boy scouts, and myself. We quickly set up the pop-up gazebo, tents for the night, tables for the radio’s, and last raised our dipole antennas.
The antennas that we chose were a 20m-80m trap dipole (Ran east-west) and my EARC-H
Endfed 6m-40m QRP (Ran north-south).
Ran an extension cord to one of the two generators the club was using and fired up all three radios we brought. A Kenwood 590S, Yaesu 817ND, and my 13-year old neighbors Swan. Did a few signal reports and viola, we were set-up.
In total, the club had five dipole antenna’s ranging from a flat top long wire, traps and Delta loops. Along with the wires we had two verticals operating too.
In total, we had eight radios on air at one time or another. My neighbor blew a transmitting tube so seven was the final number.
The weather was perfect on Saturday. Blue sky’s in the low seventies but at about 2000 hrs., we did have a brief thunder storm rumble through. No problems as I brought out a tarp to put around the gazebo to protect the radios. Sunday was another perfect day. Blue sky but cooler with a high around 65 degrees.
Saturday, we were assigned the 75/80 meter band. Things were slow until dusk and then things took off. One of my team peeled off to his tent at 2100 hrs. and my 13-year old General stuck it out till 0030 hrs. Sunday morning. I turned off our assigned generator at 0134 hrs. Sunday and hit the sack.
Sunday, I was up about 0600 hrs. using the 817ND with its internal battery not wanting to wake anybody up firing up our generator. Made a few contacts on 20 meters when I heard the other generator fire up so I fired ours up. Made coffee and started to make contacts on 20 meters. This day we made contacts on 15, 20, and 40 meters.
Overall, my three-man team made 221 contacts. One of our radios was designated as the GOTO radio and that radio recorded 27 contacts by non-license holders. We had about 20 folks that stopped by who read our ad in the local fish-wrap paper. We had several visits from local politicians, the fire and police departments, and a neighbor who complained about the generator noise. At this time, I do not have an accurate number of contacts by all seven radios however, I would venture to guess it was in excess of 1,400. That would-be Phone, CW, and digital contacts.
73….
