Yet more about Field Day
I’ve been looking through the field day logs to see what I can learn.
It was obviously more productive than recent years, with more QSOs and points than before.
Once again, getting the digital aspects of the event to play nicely with each other proved the biggest challenge. Many of the FT8 contacts that conventional logging would call duplicates seem to be exchanges where in the first minute RST and section was exchanged, then a second contact was recorded a minute later in which the station class was exchanged. The log shows 1607 contacts, while the official entry shows 1463. I wonder if the missing 144 were duplicates, or just misunderstood by the logging program.
Another thing about the log is that, unlike typical years, there was only one big gap in the log, where no contacts were made. At one time Sunday morning there was a gap of 28 minutes where nobody made any contacts. Coffee time perhaps? Through the rest of the 24 hours there were few gaps of 5 minutes or more. I guess this makes sense, given that we recorded 1463 contacts in the 1440 minutes that make up the 24 hours of FD.
Some comparative graphics …
Lessons learned
- Keep stations on the air at all times if at all possible.
- Figure out what the heck is going on with FT8.
- Start running stations before field day, logging as we go, to make sure all the toys are playing nice with each other. THEN AFTER THE EVENT, toss out contacts made before field day start time, before submitting log.
- Bandpass filters weren’t enough to keep RF from one transmitter getting into other stations’ receivers. Try toroids on ALL the cables.
- Maybe it was conditions, and maybe it was having 6dBd on 20m, but it is worth having gain pointed to California. A 90 degree beamwidth pointed there takes in a lot of the USA.
- We probably lost a lot of Vermont QSOs by keeping the CW station on the yagi so much.
- We end up having fun no matter where or what the field day set up is.
- I need to double check that a station is REALLY off an antenna before I start dismantling it (ouch!).
Canada Day
After Field Day, the RAC Canada Day contest usually feels like an afterthought. This year, with a full week between the two, I was fully recharged and ready to go.
Since most of my home station didn’t get moved to FD this year, the station was back in action without a lot of rebuilding. I managed nearly 300 contacts, all CW. There were a couple of QSOs during a local power outage. It took surprisingly little time to swap the power supply for a battery. The power was only out for 20 minutes, not enough time to fire up the generator, or even go looking for the stations usually buried in local gadget QRN, but enough to be memorable. The highlight of the operation was working a final RAC station in the frantic last five minutes of the day.
Otherwise …
One more exam is in the books, the CQ VHF contest resulted in a new grid out of Newfoundland on 6m for me, and the bike finally got reacquainted with the road, but it still hasn’t made any trips out with the radio yet.
73
mk
VE3FFK
Last Updated on 2024-12-23 by AdminOARC