As anticipated, this year's Field Day was certainly a very different event from our club's annual 3A plus GOTA team effort, however it remained as one of my absolute favorite annual events. I was going to participate alone from my shack as a 1D station, then one of my friends, AB9PR, asked if I would like to join him to operate from his back yard as a 2E station. That sounded like a lot more fun than being all by myself in my basement. Of course, proper social distancing was observed by both of us.

I am a 35 year Field Day veteran and this was AB9PR's first one so it turned out to be a fun learning process for him. We planned out our station carefully while employing his ground mounted 43 ft. vertical and 40M dipole at 50 ft. Both of us own Elecraft K3 radios and we borrowed our club's logging computers which already had N1MM installed and tested. Since the most productive Field Day bands are 40 and 20, we concentrated on those using CW and phone. We thought about integrating the FT-modes, but decided to save that for another time for simplicity. A generator was borrowed from one of AB9PR's friends and we were all set. "AB9PR 2E IL" was ready to go.

When 1800z Saturday arrived we were off. We worked for 6 hrs.on Saturday and another 4 hrs. on Sunday. Our results haven't been tabulated yet, but but I think we made over 1200 contacts with roughly 2/3 CW and 1/3 phone. Once again, 40 and 20 proved to be the bands to use, we were never without stations to work. Interestingly, we ran into only two other 2E stations throughout the whole time so I will be curious to see how many there were when the results are published. We also picked up bonus points for copying the Field Day Message and getting an article about our operation into the Chicago Tribune newspaper. Since we are both members of the North Shore Radio Club (IL), we will certainly include our score to be agregated for that club. The weather was perfect both days and everything worked perfectly, gotta love that! Great fun was had and now AB9PR is a Field Day veteran.