06/30/2003 | N3EF Last year was our (my wife Lisa and I) first Field Day as new hams. We went to our club (AARC) location to help with the setup of antennas and shelters. From there we visited three other club sites to help with antenna setup and to see what other sites were doing. We later returned to our club site to act as operators for a while. As the night came to a close we stopped by our clubs "kids club" (AARC Jr) site to help out as control operators. This year we decided to do our own thing on our property. We put up a screen tent for operating and another tent for sleeping. We built and put up two wire dipoles for 20 meters and 40 meters and used one transceiver, a Yaesu FT-897, operating on battery power. I was able to get the 20 meter antenna up at 65' between two trees with pulleys and a counterweight and put the 40 meter antenna up at 20' to work in NVIS mode for good propagation up to around 300 miles for local contacts and it also worked quite well for longer distance work. We used a laptop for logging and had a fan to keep us cool and I even set up a tv as I thought we would take a couple breaks and watch a couple shows. We didn't watch a thing! We had so much fun making radio contacts, our only break was a 3 hour nap on the floor of the screen room at about 5am. As we were getting into our sleeping bags my wife let out a scream as she swiped a spider that was crawling up her leg. When we woke up we found it on the ground and saw that it was a big black widow! We've seen a lot of them around here and I was bitten by one that had crawled in the sleeve of my coat last year on halloween of all days! An extremely painful and unpleasant experience that took two months to fully recover from. Anyhow, we managed to make 300 contacts including CO0US (special joint effort of US ops and Cuban ops in Havanna Cuba), and WC8VOA in Ohio. With about 25 minutes left we were finally satisfied and started breaking everything down. The weather was great. We did well, working 46 states including hawaii, and 72 sections including 7 in Canada and a Puerto Rico station, and most of all, we had fun! -- N3EF