Field Day 2013
Field Day is June 22, 23, 2013 Table Rock Park, Medford, OR
Field day runs from 11:00 AM Saturday, June 22 through 11:00 AM, Sunday, June 23, 2013. Our club will start setup on Friday afternoon at Table Rock Park.
Please park in the Cascade Christian High School parking lot (we have permission) as shown in the map below. It’s just west off Biddle road near the Medford airport. Note that there is no access to the park from Table Rock Rd.
Plans for Field Day include operating W7DTA as 2A Oregon.
- CW station / TH5 tribander / crank up tower.
- Phone station. We’re trying to get a tribander and tower. Otherwise dipoles.
- VHF/UHF station.
- GOTA station. 4BTV vertical. Callsign will be K7TFC. We will also try to make some digital contacts, and may combine this with the GOTA station.
The GOTA station is specifically to help new hams, prospective hams, and anyone who is a little rusty to get on the air, try a new mode, and just have some fun.
We will have dinner Friday night after setup, and Saturday night. There will also be coffee Sunday morning (when it’s desperately needed by some of us).
See you there.
As we make final preparations for Field Day 2013 I would like to encourage everyone in the club to get involved. There are opportunities to help set up and/or tear down, operate, assist operators, help welcome visitors or simply come by and socialize. There is something for everyone at Field Day. We will begin setting up on Friday, June 21st around 12 noon at Table Rock Park. I Hope to see you there! — Jeff W7KNX
From the June 2013 issue of The Repeater.
Field Day 2013 Recap
From the September 2013 issue of The Repeater.
Our Field Day this year was held again at Table Rock park in Medford. This continues to be a great site for our event, even as the property has changed hands and some of the paperwork required has increased. Our club president Jeff ably handled getting permission and approvals from the city and county, and Carl secured approval of the high school to use their parking lot.
We operated 2A this year—a CW and a Phone station, plus bonus VHF/UHF and GOTA stations. This is one less transmitter than last year, but it seemed two was a good number as we were able to staff operators a fair percentage of the 24 hours we were allowed to operate.
In stark contrast to last year, the weather this year was warm (but not hot) and sunny on Friday and Saturday, and cloudy on Sunday. The rain held off until several hours after we were all packed up Sunday. Overall it was a really great weekend for hamming and several new club members joined in the event.
The club’s re-built tribander worked great on CW, the repairs and reworking of the feedline seems to have fixed the SWR problems of years past. We used Mike Bach’s trailer and crankup for the CW tribander and a 40m dipole. On phone, Mike brought a different (heavy) tribander, and man-handled it to the top of Vern Hajek’s tower. We also put a 40m dipole on the phone station. For GOTA, we used a 4BTV vertical, and on VHF/UHF, Mike brought a truly impressive array of aluminum for 6m, 2m, and 70cm.
The tribanders and dipoles provided a good account of themselves, as both stations were able to hold a frequency and run stations on 40m, 20m, and 15m. We tried 10m a couple of times, but the band never opened, and we had no contacts on 10 at all—a rarity for Field Day near the peak of the sunspot cycle.
The club’s two generators worked great—one near the CW/GOTA station, and the other clear across the other side of the park at the Phone/VHF/UHF location. Having the two main stations well separated really helped to knock down the inter-station QRM.
Surprisingly, the 6m transmitter got into the phone station on 15m, but the placement of a 6m bandpass filter in the antenna lead of the 6m rig completely eliminated that interference.
We also had several solar panels and batteries, and were able to make the required number of solar-power contacts to claim the bonus points.
Many thanks to Mike Bach WB6FFC who provided a good 75% of our total equipment this year.
Thanks also to Joe Gunderson, who provided lots of bonus points by providing a PR booth, handouts, and inviting our public officials. We had a visit by the mayor of Butte Falls, and also by our Section Manager Bonnie Altus. Bonnie joined us for our dinner Saturday night, and was able to spend several hours chatting with club members.
Our CW and Phone stations both used computer logging this year, creating various almost-Cabrillo formats for the logs. [Ed note: there is no official Cabrillo format for Field Day]. This eliminates a lot of tedious keystroking after the contest and is much appreciated!
After the logs were entered, the computerized ones were converted to ADIF format and uploaded to our W7DTA ARRL Logbook of the World (LOTW) account, and immediately matched about 10% of the entered contacts. This has cut down the paper QSL card count quite a bit, to one (so far).
Our photographers for Field Day this year were Todd, K7TFC, and Jerry, K6KSI.
QSO totals
| Band | CW | Phone | GOTA |
|---|---|---|---|
| 40m | 20 | 110 | 28 |
| 20m | 238 | 309 | 35 |
| 15m | 75 | 42 | 3 |
| 6m | 10 | ||
| 2m | 6 | ||
| 432 | 3 | ||
| Total | 333 | 480 | 66 |
Our final claimed score was: 2424 QSO points plus 790 bonus points, 3214 total points.
Field Day 2013 Results
From the December 2013 issue of The Repeater.
It’s December, and the ARRL has posted results and scores for Field Day 2013. In addition to the results published in December QST, there is an on-line database which can easily be searched, filtered, and sorted.
This year our club entered Category 2A, which is the most popular category with 398 entrants listed in the database. Looking at the 100-watt power level for Oregon, the scores are shown in the tables in the December 2013 issue.
We placed about middle of the pack in terms of points, and at the top of the 2A list in terms of number of participants.
The 3A category (which we won for Oregon last year) is a bit less competitive. We would not have won it this year, but only just. If we actually had 3 transmitters, we probably could have won that category in Oregon. We beat out several 6-transmitter efforts in Oregon. Interestingly, there we no hi-power entrants in Oregon this year.
