Field Day 2010
This year Field Day will be held on the 4th weekend of June, Starting Saturday, June 26 at 11:00 AM PDT and going through Sunday afternoon at 2:00 PM PDT.
Our club is still trying to work out site arrangements, we’ve had an interesting spot or two fall through. We are working on plan B (or is that plan C?).
From the June 2010 issue of The Repeater.
Scott Cummings, KD7ECB gave a report on Field Day. He reported that the Civil Air Patrol Hanger and surrounding area would be the location of this year’s field day.
From the June 3, 2010 meeting minutes.
RVARC Field Day 2010
From the September 2010 issue of The Repeater.
Field Day 2010 was different than previous field days held by the Rogue Valley ARC. This year our effort was more of a public-outreach outing, and less of the make-the-most contacts type of operation. We operated from the Medford Civil Air Patrol (CAP) hanger located at the Medford airport. Scott Cummings was instrumental in securing permission to operate at the CAP facilities.
We traditionally have set up on Friday afternoon so that we are ready to go on Saturday at the 11:00 AM opening bell. Unfortunately this year we were not able to set up Friday afternoon due to the lack of people with proper security to supervise us on the airport grounds. We had to wait until Saturday morning at 7:00 AM before the appropriate people would be around. This turned out to be good practice for the ‘unexpected scenario’ element of emergency communications. Fortunately the airport is not too far out of town, so most didn’t have too long a commute each way on Friday just to be delayed.
Saturday morning we started our setup at 7:00 AM. It turns out that the CAP was having an emergency training exercise the exact same weekend as Field Day, so we needed to be sure that our operations would not conflict with the CAP. This was accomplished by operating on the mezzanine in the hanger, overlooking the CAP air force. We needed to extend AC power cables from the generator, and 50-ohm coaxial cables from the various antennas up to the mezzanine, and thus we ended up need a lot more and longer cables than what we brought with us.
The first antenna we put up was a TH6 tribander on the crank-up tower. We laid out the antenna elements on the asphalt pad in front of the hanger, carefully in the order from the assembly drawing. But Don noticed even with that we still got some of the elements in the wrong place. The TH6 is non-intuitive in how everything goes together. Lud solved this problem well– at the end of Field Day he brought 6-7 rolls of different colored electrical tape and color-coded each element and the boom appropriately as we were breaking down. Smart guy. As long as the tape stays intact, it will be easier next year! The tribander worked extremely well this year, as long as in fact we had the right feedline hooked up! With three very long cables on the mezzanine, we got the wrong ones hooked up to the radios for an hour. Ed was still able to make a few 6M contacts on the TH6, but the 20m SSB team was not as successful on the 6m yagi. Lud, can we borrow some more of that colored tape for the feedlines next year?
We also built a 40m/80m dipole from scratch and used a spare balun. It was hung below the tribander on the crank-up tower, and had ends suspended from a 30-foot fiberglass mast on one end, and an airplane-stair-set on the other (climbing airplane stairs is the easy way to get up to the antenna tie point!). We also assembled the 6m yagi. It is an 8 element beam—and may be just a bit too narrow in pattern for Field Day, as Ed had to swing it around a lot.
Scott started soldering up new coaxial cables right away, and he managed to complete a number of additional runs by 11:00 AM. Unfortunately it took until about 1:30 to complete all the runs for the 3 antennas. Simultaneously, Don Bennett got a very heavy duty AC power cord to run the 200 feet from the generator to the mezzanine. Unfortunately every time it was plugged into the generator, the generator would shut down (even with no load on the cable). This turned out to be due to a broken AC plug on the cable, and Don and Herb went around to some hardware stores to fetch the needed replacement parts.
We started the contest on commercial AC power. Ed Vaughn started on 6 meter SSB with a automobile 12V battery. A good thing as the best 6m band opening of the weekend was just finishing as Field Day started.
About 1:30 in the afternoon, the generator power cable was finished and routed into the building, and we were able to start operating on generator power. While the vast majority of our contacts were on generator and battery power, we did make at least one contact on AC power, so our club was required to enter the 2A—Commercial category.
While it was a little circuitous, we came up with a way to route and secure all the cables so that airplanes could enter and leave the hanger, and the hanger doors could be closed. Several Cessna 182 planes did come and go from neighboring states due to the CAP exercise. When the engine and prop were fired up inside the hanger we got a sudden large burst of air conditioning. Operating inside the hanger was good—we were able to stay out of the direct sun for most of the event.
The airport is actually a pretty scenic location. Mt McLoughlin was plainly visible directly to the east, and Roxy Ann to the south east. John Griffin, KF7JWC took a number of photographs of our event, and the photos in this article are thanks to John.
We had several training sessions with CAP cadets. One on HF propagation, one on HD digital operations, and one on operating technique in Field Day. We invited the cadets to make contacts on 20m SSB Saturday night, when 20m was crammed full of signals. A few cadets developed mic fright, but we had some that made 15-20 contacts while us hams logged.
This was a different type of Field Day event in that we were not focused solely on operating, and had the chance to meet with our CAP hosts, have training sessions with the cadets, and in general enjoy the event in a bit more relaxed fashion. I think the CAP staff were impressed with our club and operation, hopefully we might be invited to operate there again.
Overall, we made 7 digital QSOs, 172 CW QSO’s and 278 phone QSO’s. Along with bonus points, we submitted a claimed score in 2A-Commercial of 1,542 points.
