Field Day 2018
RVARC will again collaborate with CARE and JCARES to host Field Day 2018 at ScienceWorks Hands-on Museum, 1500 E. Main St., Ashland.
Preparations for Field Day weekend June 23-24 were discussed. The club got the 1x1 callsign K7N for this event and the category will be 3A, comprising a GOTA, a CW, and 2 phone stations of under 150 watts transmit power. (Logging programs should be able to provide output in the Cabrillo or ADIF file format.)
Permits were obtained from Ashland Fire Dept and fire extinguishers were recertified. Porta-potties were ordered at a cost of $25. Setup will begin at Noon on the 22nd and teardown at 11am on the 24th.
From the June 2018 meeting minutes, in the September 2018 issue of The Repeater.
Field Day 2018
From the September 2018 issue of The Repeater.
The RVARC collaborated again this year with CARE and JCARES to host Field Day at Ashland ScienceWorks. We had good weather on Friday and Saturday with reasonable temperatures and sunny skies. Sunday was a bit warmer.
This year Mike Bach took care of the (increasing) paperwork dealing with permits, agreements, insurance, etc.
We operated 3A this year—one CW station and two Phone stations. The 20m Phone station moved to digital when 20m Phone became just too difficult. The lack of band openings on 10m and 15m means that most of the participants move down to 20m Phone and it becomes too crowded to operate effectively. 20m closed early Saturday because of low or nonexistent sunspots.
20m CW by contrast is crowded but not overwhelming, and the CW operators did well, making about 400 contacts Saturday.
After difficulties on 40m Phone last year, Mike brought a 2 element shortened yagi (linear loading) which was put on the 30-foot tilt-up tower. It performed amazingly well receiving a lot of reports of ‘very strong signal’. The log tells the tale—we had about 630 contacts on 40m phone, the highest number that I can remember.
Mike Bach served again as Chief cook (and bottlewasher) putting together several fine meals, and a particularly large spread Saturday night. We had a large turnout again this year due to 3 clubs participating.
Curt Hadley called out the media. One TV station did an on-site news story, and the Medford Mail-Tribune published a very large article in the Sunday paper on Ham Radio and Field Day. Curt did a great job.
The club may get spoiled by the good weather!
RVARC would like to thank ScienceWorks for hosting Field Day this year.
ARRL Field Day 2018 Results
From the December 2018 issue of The Repeater.
The ARRL 2018 Field Day results have been published on their webpage, and are printed in the December issue. 2018 was a poor year in terms of the sunspot cycle, and stations on the west coast are affected more than most other areas of the country due to geography.
10 and 15 meters did not open from the west coast to the east coast, and conditions on 20 meters were as struggle as most folks vacated 10 and 15 and moved to 20 meters resulting in huge crowds, coupled with poor propagation. 20 meters closed in the late afternoon, forcing our operations to 40 and 80 meters. Our 40m yagi did an outstanding job on phone.
Our 3-club effort at K7N resulted in a good score in comparison to other west coast and northwestern division outings. We had the top score for 3A in Oregon. We placed 3rd in Oregon amongst all categories, and 3rd in the Northwestern division for 3A.
