Field Day - June 26-27, 2010
Thanks to everyone who came out to help over the weekend!!Started setting up shortly after 2 PM on Friday afternoon. Had the beam assembled, on the tower, and the tower vertical, the 40 Meter vertical antenna up, and had the ropes up in the trees for the windom antenna, in about 2 1/2 hours. I think that was our quickest set up ever.
Started hooking up the rest of the gear Saturday morning. While working on that, we were able to witness part of a high speed police chase on Clark Road (in front of our Field Day site) ... it looked like something out of a movie!
We got the radios hooked up, and while getting ready to hook up the laptops ... we couldn't get either one of them to turn on! Not sure how, or what we did, but after struggling and scratching our heads, they finally turned on and booted up. We finally got them hooked to the radios and networked together. Shortly before the start, gave everyone there a quick lesson on operating and logging, and we were ready to go.
Plugged away Saturday afternoon, until a Thunderstorm decided to park on top of us! We disconnected the antennas, moved the picnic tables, and covered the equipment as best we could, to try and keep the rain off the gear. We lost about an hour of operating time due to the storm.
Later Saturday, one of the laptops decided to act up again ... this time, the monitor quit working. Tried hooking up a second monitor ... and loading and configuring the software on a spare computer was taking too long ... so we ended up swapping hard drives ... and that seemed to be the end of the computer issues for the rest of the weekend.
We had a few bursts of unbelievable activity on phone ... sometimes sounding like 10-20 stations calling us at once!
We finished and shut down at 2 PM Sunday, and had things packed up and cleared out in just over an hour.
Think we accomplished a couple of our goals ... several folks had fun with their first Field Day experience, and ended up turning in a decent score to boot! I suppose that means we can do it all again next year.
The final numbers look like this:
| CW QSO's | Phone QSO's | |
| 40m | 253 | 9 |
| 20m | 156 | 408 |
| 15m | 228 | 162 |
| 10m | 100 | 310 |
| TOTAL | 737 | 889 |
| Bonus Points | |
| 100% Emergency power | 200 |
| Set-up in Public Place | 100 |
| Public Information Table | 100 |
| NTS message to ARRL SM/SEC | 100 |
| W1AW Field Day Message | 100 |
| Site Visit by invited served agency official | 100 |
| Submitted via the Web | 50 |
| Total Bonus Points | 750 |
Claimed Score = 5,476 points
Helpers, operators, and support:
Eddie, K4JP
Bob, KF4JRO
Jerry, N9HJ
Dick, KI4EFJ
Val, W1UTR
Bill, KJ4UEI
Gregory, KJ4FEZ
Craig, KE9IY
Dianne, KJ4LYX
George, WB3EMQ
Dan, WD4DC
Al, K1ERT
Linda Colbert
Curt
Ron, WD4AHZ
Thanks to everyone for their help and support. Already looking forward to doing it again next year!
Ron, WD4AHZ
