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Ham Radio Field Day Is Here
ArticulateArne writes: "The holiest day of the year is upon the Amateur Radio community. Field Day is here once again. Field Day is a 24 hour period during which ham radio operators go out into fields and set up radios and antennas and see how many other stations they can talk to. The idea is to simulate an emergency situation, but it's a lot of fun anyway. Here is a decent explanation of the festivities, see also the official rules and other miscellaneous info. Our club, the CBCARC, W5CBC, will be out working as well, so say hi if you hear us." Combine this with geocaching, and a whole new sport is born ...
I decided pretty much at the last minute that I should go on FD this year. So, I packed the car then headed out to my mom's house on the other side of town where she has plenty of land to put up big wire antennas. I ran class 1B-Battery this year, and was 100% solar powered for the duration.
Setup was not much of a problem. I did blow a fuse in the PV combiner box (one of the wires to one of the solar panels came loose and shorted everything). Then the Rippoff Shack cable I bought was screwed up - the idiots did not strip the center conductor of the coax when they made it. Note to RS: insulators make poor conductors. Note to self: Never by Radio Shack parts ever again as you can buy floor sweepings of much higher quality for much less money at the electronic junk stores.
My K2 worked flawlessly. I got a few much needed QRP DX out of the way too, including KL7 and KH6 on 10, 15, and 20, voice and CW. Got a lot of new states too. Oh, and I broke a pileup with a SP8 on my first call while running 5 watts out on SSB. There were a bunch of QRO stations calling him too. I was impressed with myself.
Not sure of my final count, but I don't care. I had fun and proved to myself that everything works. Well, kinda works. I fell asleep 12 hours into FD. I woke up a few hours later and got back on - only the MFJ tuner I was using decided to not give me any reading on the meters any more. Not sure if a bug has made a home in there or what as I have not been able to pull the cover off yet to look.
Randy NV0U
I just finished organizing Field Day for the Montreal club. Despite the fact that the point was not contesting, we still racked up about 1150 contacts over the 24 hours. More importantly, we setup in a bare field outside the fire department and showed them what we can do. We'll have pictures soon of a Bronto Skylift hoisting an HF tribander onto a 35-foot tower.
The purpose of Field Day is setting up a station. That's why it's called Field Day. The contesting part just gives hams something to do for the 24 hours of operating.
If you want a ragchew contest, check out the RAC Canada Day Contest next weekend (0000-2359 Jul 1) (and look for VC2A!)
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
I'd like to tell you all the story of my grandfather (yeah, I know, images of the old vacation slides coming out). My grandfather was a successful businessman into his 40s. He was an executive with a firearms company (business was good at that time) and always into doing something productive.. not much different than most of us, I think. But when he turned 40 he lost his sight. As a computer professional, I can only imagine what this is like.. but anyway.. to make a long story short he retired and became a ham radio operator. Now you might ask yourself.. why in the world would a former executive who lost his sight become a ham radio operator? To join the ranks of the fat and bald?? Well, he did it first, because nobody would know he was blind. And second, because he found out he could help people! Every day in his retirement, like a job, he would check into the international radio networks. On these networks, you find serious people doing serious business with Ham Radio. Every so often he would come across someone in the world in dire medical need. In one case, it was a missionary station in Venezula who explained that they had a little boy who urgently needed medicine. In another, it was a fisherman in Honduras who had the benz and the local doctor needed medical advice. Yet another case -- one that touched my grandfathers heart -- was one where a little girl became blind after drinking antifreeze and no doctor was in the village. In each of these cases, my grandfather would patch in American doctors.. and in some cases arrange for the necessary medicine flown in by plane (often the local Miami doctors would supply the medicine free of charge). These are all real cases of how Amateur radio actually helped people. Yes, it's a hobby of lots of fat bald men, but it's also a key means of communication to areas of the world that don't yet have cell phones and wireless Internet. P.S. If you think everyone in Ham Radio is fat and Bald... here's a picture of my grandfather... god I miss him.. (he passed away about 10 years ago, god bless him). http://pw1.netcom.com/~jmulvey/wb4elx.jpg