08/11/2004 | KC7Z The North Kitsap Amateur Radio Club once again this year participated in the American Radio Relay Leagues annual Field Day event from the Vinland Elementary School in Poulsbo, WA. Prior to the actual setup of the antennas and the stations at the site for this event, many hours of preparatory work paid great dividends. The club was awarded 3 proclamations from the City of Bremerton, the City of Poulsbo and Kitsap County proclaiming June 20-27, 2004 as "Amateur Radio Week" to coincide with the Field Day Weekend, June 26-27, 2004.There were contacts made, and personal invitations given to all of the City Council Members of both Poulsbo and Bremerton City Councils and the Kitsap County Commissioners. These led to site visits by Kathryn Quade of the Poulsbo City Council and Jan Angel, Kitsap County Commissioner on Saturday, June 26, 2004.

Steve Finley, West Sound, Emergency Services Manager for the American Red Cross and Gary Bolen, Red Cross Volunteer observed the activities at the site on Sunday, June 27, 2004. An invitation was also sent to the Department of Emergency Management and the Salvation Army but neither chose to accept our invitation.

The Bremerton Sun newspaper ran a small announcement about the activity for several days prior to the event. While the North Kitsap Herald ran a story entitled, "Hams to bone up on skills at annual field day," that ran in the June 23rd edition of the paper. The story was written by Carrina Stanton after a lengthy phone interview with the Field Day Chair, Bill Frazier, W7ARC.

On Friday, prior to the actual operation, 13 volunteers arrived at the Field Day site to erect antennas. With the help of potato guns and sure muscle power, the team installed the clubs B&W folded dipole antenna, an off-center fed dipole, a tri-band 3-element yagi, a 3 band vertical and a high gain VHF antenna for use with the two primary stations, the "Get On The Air" (GOTA) station and a VHF-FM station. Floyd, KC7EVL and Burres, KC7GFN provided security for the site Friday night.Fourteen club members and invited guest operators took part in the actual operation of Field Day 2004, making 436 QSOs on both CW and phone modes combined over the 24 hour period. We handled 15 pieces of formal NTS traffic including messages to the Section Manager and the Section Emergency Coordinator.

Saturday afternoon, Jere, W7TVA, brought in the Kitsap County Emergency Communications Vehicle to be used as the GOTA station KD7WDG. At which point we shut down the clubs hand cart station and transferred the control to the mobile station. He was able to make 10 contacts from this station.

The GOTA station was also visited by the Booher boys, members of a local Scout troop who were each given a turn at the microphone to make a contact on the air. Contacts were made with Bob, KA6ARR of Keno, OR who talked to each of the boys in turn.The site also attracted other visitors right up to the time we packed everything up and headed for our individual homes. We had a total of 21 visitors to the site over the two days, many with questions and one with a complaint about the noise of the generator.

Russ, KI7PG supplied pizza, soda, water, and coffee for lunch, while Jerry, K9CCZ, club president, brought in Kentucky Fried Chicken with all the trimmings for dinner. Susan, AB7MD brought in McDonalds Egg McMuffins for breakfast on Sunday.

The weekend was not without incident "Murphy" was hard at work. It was found that the clubs Alinco DX-70 was only capable of producing 30 watts on 75 and 40 meters making it almost useless with the B&W dipole as a GOTA station. The rig worked well on 20 meters but with another station on 20 meters, this only lead to interference problems so contacts were sparse via that station. No contacts were logged via the VHF FM station although we did monitor several of the VHF simplex frequencies.

A neighbor to the school across the road came over about midnight Saturday to complain of the noise from the generator. He stated that his family couldnt sleep with the generator running. We decided to keep peace and harmony with the neighborhood and decided to suspend operation from the generator-dependent station and only operate from the trailer on battery power. We operated this way until 8 AM Sunday morning when we brought the generator and station #2 back on line.All in all it was a pretty good weekend. We all had lots of fun, ate too much of the wrong things, and stayed up way too late. We are claiming a score or 1,114 points for the weekend and well see where that places us with the rest of the folks that participated this weekend.

Thanks goes to all those operators who put up with long shifts, lousy band conditions, bad operators and just plain "Lids".

I want to thank each and everyone that helped with this weekend;
Jerry, K9CCZ, Horace, K7ORY, Dick, W7VS, Ed, AC7H, Malcolm, NF7M, Susan, AB7MD, Connie, N7NVQ, Floyd, KC7EVL, Burres, KC7GFN,Jim, K7LD, Russ, KI7PG, Forrest, WA7EEK, Ed, KA7UJA, Ed, N7NVP, Jere, W7TVA, Dave, N7VRZ, Nick, and Gary. THANK YOU! For helping make this weekend a success no matter how we scored. -- W7ARC