07/06/2005 | W The Boulder Amateur Radio Club has typically spent it's Field Day weekend making sure that their Auxiliary Youth Club called the BARC Juniors have everything, and everyone they need to assure a flawless Field Day effort each year. This year some of our newer BARC members wanted to try their hand at a Field Day for the BARC "Seniors" too. So, they organized themselves, met a couple of times and got a working group together and planned a 2A class station.

This Field Day 2005 effort was instigated and organized by John Reilly, WFR. John has just recently been re-licensed as a ham after many years in hiatus. He really wanted to have a Field Day like he remembered in his youth... although no one had a spark gap transmitter to bring (only kidding, John is much younger than I am). I hope this Field Day operation sufficed for him. I know it was memorable for me, and I'm a veteran of many.

We would have in our Field Day group no less than 4 PhD's with Electrical Engineering and Astronomy degrees, 5 hams with BSEE's, 2 electrical equipment sales engineers, one lawyer and a few techs. It would be a wonder if we get anything off the drawing boards and up and running in time! Sometimes, I find in business that you have to "kill" the engineers in order to get any project launched in time.. How could we do this in the limited time allowed on Field Day to set up with this esteemed group of hams? As it turned out, you couldn't ask for a more cooperative bunch of guys. Everyone pitched in and got the job done with time to spare and everything working in perfect order.

The first item on the agenda was WHERE to have our BARC Senior Field Day. In Boulder, CO we are blessed with mountainous terrain to the west of us and there are a few locations that would make an excellent Field Day site with very good facilities. One of the prime locations is the Betasso Preserve just 5 miles west of Boulder at an elevation of 6700'. The accomodations are excellent with a log constructed group shelter for protection and nearby ample parking for the gang. The catch is that the local County Park authorities don't allow overnight camping there! So, we enlisted the aid of our served agency of our Boulder County ARES (BCARES) group, the Boulder County Sheriffs Office and the Office of Emergency Management. They were all too glad to recommend us to the Boulder County Park Department for this nationwide emergency preparedness event.

We met with the Park Rangers before the Field Day weekend and found that they too were familiar with our local Boulder Amateur Radio Club and the BCARES group. They had been involved in a NIMS exercise with our hams before and felt this would be a useful exercise in a potential operational emergency site and therefore granted us the permission we needed. Armed with a letter of permission from the authorities in hand, we set out to get our antennas and equipment together and plan out the logistics for Field Day weekend.

First we needed antennas. Tom Thompson, WVJ had built a Moxon Beam for Field Day last year that he had used at an Oklahoma site. This year he would be here with the BARC club for Field Day flying up from his temporary work QTH in Houston, TX just for the Field Day weekend. The Moxon Beam had easily attachable wires for 40m thru 10m. It also had a rotator and a rope and pulley array for moving the antenna. After taking a look at the location where we would be operating from, we knew we could easily hoist the antenna up by using the available 40' pine trees adjacent to the site. The other trees would be available for the dipoles we planned to use as well. The lead ropes would be accurately slung over the tree limbs with Tom, WVJ's trusty sling shot.

The Moxon Beam played very well on 15M and 20M with many reports of "Boy, you guys are loud!". I sort of figured it was going to work well when I gave it a test an hour before Field Day started and my first QSO on 20M was with Mark, 9A8A in Croatia and he told me I was 10dB over S9! Then I swung the Moxon around to the northwest and talked to an Oregon station. I asked him to give me a signal report as I swung the Moxon Beam around to the southeast and back. He said.. "You disappeared!" - Nice... Front to back on these Moxon Beams calculate to near 30dB. We checked out all the wire antenna arrays and they all were 1.1:1 SWR in the portion of the band they were designed for.

We had expert assistance from Will Crary, NWS on setting up and taking down our equipment. Will always has the right tools and know-how as he is very active with the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group and with his own business providing sound systems for events.

The power would be provided by the generator in my motorhome, a 4Kw genset that is fueled by the main 60 gallon fuel tank thereby alleviating the need to have Gerry cans and outside generators. This would make for a somewhat quieter operation and much safer from not having fuel cans laying about the forest. A propane powered 4 Kw generator was in the ready as a backup if needed.

The radios performed flawlessly. We got a chance to use the BARC owned TS-480SAT that will ultimately be used on the club's HF Remote project. It is a very nice transceiver. Tom, WVJ had brought along his homebrew bandpass filters and boy, did they ever come in handy! That allowed us to be just about anywhere in frequency and mode to each other without any interference. As the Field Day Gospel expounds: "Never operate thy Field Day transceivers without thine own bandpass filter".

On CW we used one of Tom, WVJ's multi-band dipoles and it also played very well. The CW station piled up twice as many QSOs as the SSB station did, primarily due to the effort of veteran contester Nick Elias, N3AIU in a non-contest event who did yeoman work in that mode with over 700 QSOs out of the 928 total! AND.. he did that while catching a break for some much needed Z's too!

Personally, I was excited this year to have an ATV link between the BARC Senior and BARC Junior Field Day sites. I had always thought that would be a fun demo to do. This year it finally was made possible through the determined effort of Jim Andrews, WAHD who devised a workable location and path using multiband, multimode ATV equipment and the homebrew portable ATV repeater from the BCARES cache. Jim had scouted out the location first and did a topographical map from some possible ATV locations. On reviewing the topo results, only one of the locations proposed would actually work. Jim provided a full duplex ATV video and audio link. We had fun talking with and seeing the BARC Juniors in operation at their K1D Field Day location in the Boulder valley from our QTH over 7 miles away! Thanks also go to George Kretke, NUX and Doshia Kretke, KAAS for completing the duplex link from the BARC Junior's K1D site.

We also were able to get bonus credit for satellite contacts and natural power from Chuck Duey, KIG who provided those QSO's over the AO-51 and FO-29 satellites from his solar charged batteries operating his transceivers and antenna arrays. Chuck makes it look easy as he is one of the best there is at working satellites in the field and is often a guest speaker at AMSAT conventions.

Don Nelson, NGY showed us why he and his fellow contest team members are usually on the top of the scores in VHF/UHF contests. Don brought up his "Rover" vehicle and "fixed" it to operate and provide us QSOs on 2M, 70cm and 6M as well as even finding us a QSO on 10GHz! His stacked Moxon arrays played very well and his persistence to catch each and every short opening on 6M showed up well in our final score.

As I said before.. the food was great. The grill was manned and operated by Gary Carroll, WN and John, WFR and they put out a wonderful Saturday evening steak dinner and Sunday morning breakfast for all who were there. Many thanks also go to John's XYL and his family for bringing up to the mountain site all the last minute fixings for the dinner! Thanks to you all for a superb feast.

Operating the CW station ALONE during the very, very early morning hours with the dinner leftovers still on the picnic tables nearby gave me something else to think about while everyone else was asleep. Maybe a large, uninvited visitor with a black fur coat might try to join me (or worse yet,... have me) for an early morning snack? I'd never even hear it approaching with my headphones on. If a bear did show up, maybe it would have helped me log? Then again, maybe not... with those long, curved claws they are lousy at typing. Fortunately, there wasn't one on the prowl looking to eat some 'Italian' for an entree that morning... I think!

We managed to draw a few people up from the Denver area to our site. Chris Dunn, K9CLD and his XYL decided to join us at our mountain location because it sounded like a fun place to operate from. They even took a turn at the SSB station during the wee hours and gave it a nice run. We enjoyed having them come up and join us too.

It was Bill Hedrick, ABH's FIRST ever Field Day. Bill seemed to enjoy himself and really took in all the happenings. He even managed to find time to hike the 7 mile trail around the Betasso Preserve. Bill finally took a turn at the radio on 20m SSB and started out a little hesitantly, but within 15 minutes he was running the contacts like an old pro. That is what Field Day really is all about -- operating.

Lots of other operators helped too. Don Hume, KR jumped in on CW and SSB and provided a lot of QSOs. ED Gasner, NAD assisted in the logging for the CW and SSB stations. I know there were others there who contributed too and only my failing memory stops me from reporting their names and callsigns here.

Being in a public park close to the City of Boulder assured us of lots of visitors, and they were all greeted by whoever saw them first to explain the strange site that beheld their eyes. The visitors that stopped by wanted to get an explanation of what we were doing, and how we were doing it, as well as asking us the obvious question... Why? The Park Rangers came by from time to time to see how we were doing and see if we needed anything. Our served agency sent up a Deputy to watch our operation too. The Deputy was familiar with us from seeing our BCARES group at wildfires and other emergency operations using our ATV equipment, but was somewhat amazed by seeing and hearing the rest of the communication modes we are able to run at the same time.

The Betasso Preserve Field Day location was superb. The shelter, the scenery, the participants and the food were all great, the mosquitos were non-existent and the location, radio-wise, was excellent. Most importantly, no one got hurt!

The final result for WK was 460 SSB QSO's, 928 CW QSO's, 5 satellite QSOs and we gathered 950 bonus points for a grand total of 5592 points in the Class 2A category. Not bad for a hasty effort! Thanks to one and all of the BARC members for making this year's Field Day such a huge success.

My only regret was that this year I couldn't be in two places at once. I missed being at the BARC Junior site for the late night shift, where I usually can be found on Field Day helping those die-hard kids get a few more QSO's. As much as I like operating on Field Day, I also enjoy watching others operate, sometimes for their very first time on HF. It is truly a fun experience... isn't it? -- WM