Greater Norwalk Amateur Radio Club.

N1EV 3A CT

Our usual location on the water & near downtown Norwalk, CT is a large park, 1000' by 1000'. There are fields used for soccer that were marked closed until 4pm Sunday. We installed those signs.

We were very lucky with the weather especially since we were trying a rather unusual antenna system.
We launched a 7' helium filled balloon supporting a full sized 80 meter inverted Vee. Ant was 132' long with it's apex at 135 ft above ground and the antenna ends at about 115' high. Fed with 150 ft of 300 ohm lightweight TV twinlead.
The antenna is made from No. 24 magnet wire. It was broadside to the S/W...N/E. We worked all over the USA. Around 11PM we even worked loads of California stations. Signals were very strong both receive & transmit. Comments on SSB such as strongest FD signal heard, powerful signal, etc. were numerous.  When 80M had little activity before about 5PM EST we used the antenna on 15M. It worked very well there too. We were able to keep the balloon up about 22 hours out of 24.

Our other antennas were an Old ATB-34 Cushcraft tribander up about 60' and a two element wire beam for 40M. The Tribander was checked for proper dimensions and continuity of element components. We found a 9" error in the reflector. Probably been that way the last 6 to 8 Field Days. The error was corrected and the antenna ‘Rocked”. All antennas on our 3A primary stations worked very well this year and I believe we have a record score.

6 meters opened and our 4 element quad at 40 feet performed admirably. 6 opened both days and we worked some stations on the West Coast!

We had some new hams and some inactive ones visit and get on the air. Enough operators, CW & Phone so no station was left unattended the full 24 hours.

Wonderful Ham fuel with 5 meals plus prepared by KA1CVV. A fantastic effort from Ned.

We were especially happy to see the creator of EchoLink, K1RFD and member of GNARC, do some good time on CW. Even had a visit by the technical editor of QST, W1ZR who checked out our operations. He even gave us a tour of his Marine Mobile station as he was able to dock a mere 1000' feet from our FD site.
 
We have great setup and take down crews so everything went quite smooth.