07/16/2007 | W5IU Lockheed Martin Radio Club,
Fort Worth, TX

Field Day 07 caught us by surprise this year after a busy May and June full of Dayton, Ham-Com, and Balloon Launch Meetings. It was finally brought to a head by Roy, KE5CKC, and Tim, K5AC. Our usual Coordinator, Tommy, W5TCD, and Chief Cook, Larry, K5PHD, chose (with their XYLs help) Field Day Weekend to start a two week vacation.

The festivities started on Friday afternoon with the installation of Tims Battle Creek Special Antenna. This was a treat for us folks that had never seen this antenna before. It has been used as a low band antenna for several DXpeditions over the years. It went up without a hitch and was followed by a contest to see which would work best for putting up dipoles; a Slingshot and Spinning Reel or a Crossbow and Spinning Reel. The Slingshot won this year.

Saturday morning we encountered our first bout with Murphys Law, one of our two main generators chose this time to develop an internal short and fry the alternator before start time. Later in the day a secondary generator gave up the ghost too. We managed to struggle on throughout the rest of Field Day on one new Honda primary generator and a last minute substitute secondary.

All of the stations except the Satellite Station hit the air at start time and did well throughout the contest. We were in 3A with free VHF and Satellite stations. Two of the 3A stations were devoted to CW and the remainder to Phone. Aside from some difficulty with the logging network everything went well. Our youngest participant, Austin, KE5PBW, did well on the VHF Station during some 6 meter Sporadic E. Austin received his ticket on the day before Field Day.

The Satellite Station suffered from too much new equipment and too little time to familiarize the operators with it. We had a few false starts but ultimately recovered, made our bonus points, several other contacts, and (most importantly) made a mode L/U contact on AO-51.

Without our Chief Cook we had to resort to sending out for Pizza on Saturday evening and Breakfast Sandwiches on Sunday morning. We survived and swore that we would not let the Chief Cook go on vacation again. -- W5IU