Field Day 2015

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Please join us June 27, 28, and 29 for the RVARC Field Day 2015 effort! We will be setting up gear and antennas for a 4A effort. Our goal is to have fun and make available all three major modes of HF operating: voice (SSB), CW (that’s Morse code!), and digital (just RTTY and PSK31).

There will be two phone stations, and two CW stations. One of the station locations will also have a digital setup.

Setup will begin Friday around 11AM, operating begins 11AM Saturday and closes ‘sometime’ Sunday morning with take-down to follow.

There will be food available Friday evening, Saturday evening, and Sunday morning.

Even if you do not wish to operate, please come out to chat, help with logging, help set up or take down, or just look around.

Field Day 2015 will be located adjacent to the Dodge Bridge boat ramp area in a field accessible from the Jackson County Fire Department #3 station. Take highway 62 north from Medford, go through White City and Eagle Point, turn left a few miles north onto highway 234. Look for the road on the right (Rogue River Drive) immediately past Dodge Bridge itself. Pull in and park just past the fire station. There will be signs.

73 Allan K7GT

From the June 2015 issue of The Repeater.

Field Day 2015 Report

From the September 2015 issue of The Repeater.

We held our club’s Field Day this year at the Jackson County Fire Station 3 field area, pretty close to Dodge Bridge Park.

The site is good—with an excellent HF shot towards almost all directions, but particularly good towards the East.

This year we operated 4A—four transmitters, club or non-club group. We were in fact able to keep all 4 stations going much of the weekend due to heroic efforts by Allan, Mike, Scott, and Dave, with operating assistance by a number of other club members.

This year the phone guys arrived on site first and immediately picked out the site next to the trees, leaving the CW folks the wide open and unfortunately unbearably hot unshaded field.

We started setup on Friday afternoon, with the temperature reaching 108F. By late afternoon the steel towers and aluminum antennas were literally too hot to handle, and we called off the work for a few hours until the sun set and the metal could cool a bit.

On CW, we had a crank-up tower for the club tribander, and a Hazer on 30 foot tower for Mike’s 205BA 20M monobander, and a 40m dipole. On Phone, we had Scott’s AB577 crank up tower with a tribander and a 40m dipole.

On Saturday it became apparent that 10m would not open much if at all, and that 15m would be marginal. 20m was incredibly crowded, especially on phone, Any attempt to hold a frequency was met with other stations encroaching within seconds and within a few hundred Hertz. The only effective approach was to hang on and muscle through the intense QRM. 40m was not quite so crowded, but still much more heavily occupied than in previous years when 10 and 15 could handle more of the load. 40m was full right up to 7.300 MHz. with no breathing room at the top of the band.

CW was a little better as the number of contestants is slightly lower, and the bandwidth is a lot smaller. Good tight CW filters were needed for 20m, and learning to get right on zero-beat was necessary or you’d likely not work the other station as you would be outside their receiver passband.

Typically the bottom of the sunspot cycle favors stations in the Midwest and Southern plains as they can work both coasts, while the east coast and west coast have a difficult time working each other through the intense interference.

Our effort this year focused on the key bands of 20m and 40m, and long hours of operating in the 107F heat on Saturday paid off with the best score the RVARC has ever submitted.

We also received bonus points—for copying the CW bulletin (thanks, Bud), emergency power, and others. We did not have a GOTA station this year, which probably worked to our score advantage as we could focus all operating on the high-run-rate stations.

In all, I counted 29 people in attendance. Photographs are from Raoul Salem, KG6DKA and Jerry Fulstone, K6KSI.

Our total claimed score for 2015 is in the table, below. Once again the Phone ops made more QSOs than the CW ops. However because the CW contacts are worth twice as many points per contact, the CW ops out-pointed the Phone operators.

Overall this was a very strong club effort, our score was just as hot as the weather. It is likely we are going to be high in the rankings. Our score this year would have won the Oregon section last year, and come in the top ten in the Northwestern division. We’ll have to see if other clubs had similar good years. The results typically appear in the December issue of QST, and may be released earlier on the web. We’ll include a score summary when available from the ARRL.

	40m	20m	15m	Total QSOs
CW QSOs	107	821	115	1,043
Phone QSOs	512	801		1,313
Bonus Points				750
Total Claimed Points				7,548

A Python program was written to take all the logs (either Cabrillo or ADIF) and merge them for computing the totals. Electronic logs plus the program made quick work of duping.

Field Day 2015—Results

From the December 2015 issue of The Repeater.

Results from the ARRL Filed Day 2015 event have been released. The article summarizing the contest, the complete scores listing, and the on-line searchable database are all on the ARRL webpage, and in QST for December 2015.

This year our club made an outstanding showing at Field Day. Using the special 1x1 callsign K7M, the Rogue Valley ARC took the top spot in Oregon (out of 42), and the number 3 slot in the entire Northwestern Division (out of 194 ). We placed 13th overall in the 4A category for all entrants in the USA plus Canada (out of 155).

Our huge score was made possible due to lots of aluminum, 4 transmitters, and most importantly our dedicated CW and phone operators hanging in there during the extremely hot weather.

Oregon Section Leaders

#	Call	Score	Category	QSOs	Power Mult	GOTA Call	Section	Participants	Club
1	K7M	7,548	4A	2,356	2		OR	29	Rogue Valley ARC
2	W7OTV	6,000	4A	1,347	2		OR	86	Oregon Tualatin Valley ARC
3	N7LE	5,348	2A	1,555	2		OR	11	Central OR DX Club
4	KK7PR	4,624	3E	1,570	2		OR	11
5	N7DS	3,698	2B2C	912	2		OR	2
6	W7EL	3,520	1B1B	327	5		OR	1
7	W7Q	3,178	3A	1,071	2	N7DOD	OR	14
8	W7AU	3,146	4A	757	2		OR	12	Terrie Hill and Friends
9	W7SAA	3,100	4A	677	2	K7JLT	OR	44	Salem ARC