06/30/2006 | W0DK The Boulder Amateur Radio Club (BARC) http://www.qsl.net/w0dk/ held its 2A Field Day operation using the club callsign, WK again up at Betasso Preserve just west of Boulder, CO on a hilltop location at about 6,600'. This event is coordinated by our hard-working and well-organized Field Day Chairman, John Reilly, WFR.

Last year we broke in our clubs new TS-480S XCVR and this year we added the BARC Club's newly purchased 3-element SteppIR beam to the fray on top of a 40' tower. The well-engineered and constructed base-hinged tower assembly was built by Tom Thompson, WVJ. The attached SteppIR beam went up incredibly smooth on the clever sliding pulley assembly Tom engineered and the beam was soon clear of the trees around it.

An 80M-10M wiretapped adjustable dipole was then constructed among the tall trees adjacent to our site. The dipole was strung up with the traditional well-aimed slingshot/fishing reel combo catapulted over a tall tree limb. We got the dipole strung up to about 38 high and broad sided it east/west. Both antennas played extremely well throughout the event. An Icom 746 was assigned as the CW station and a FT-857 would be the SSB station for this event and both were located under the rustic Betasso Preserve Group Shelter's roof. The shelter is made from hewn logs with a steel roof and no side walls. Some strategically placed nylon tarps we brought along provided the wind and rain breaks for the sides when necessary.

The core group of BARC Field Day participants numbered 10 club members who organized Field Day and set up the stations and antennas and brought up all of those necessary items that we thought we should have on site. A lot of construction skill was provided in the setup by Wil Crary, NWZ and Ed Gansen, NAD. We had an additional 12 hams show up to operate or just look around at the stations and socialize during the event. Our Colorado Section Manager, Jeff Ryan, KM pitched in early in the morning and helped us get the antennas set up before leaving to make his 'Grande Tour' of the other Field Day sites ran by the other Field Day groups up and down the Front Range of the Rockies.

Some hams I hadnt seen in a long time showed up to see what we were doing, including a couple of great ops from the super competitive Field Day operation, K2NA that I had the pleasure to work with back in the 90s. Lary Eichel, K2NA and Gene Spinelli, K5GS came by to give us their moral support. Later on, Dave Patton, KGW stopped by with a friend of his that had not operated in over 20 years and thought this event might get him interested again. He was somewhat tentative at first but soon was twisting the XCVR's knobs and tapping out some CW on the keyer.

Generator power was provided by a 4KW power plant from our motor home located about 75 away from the site. This allowed us to run continuously without having to shut down to refuel the generator during the 24-hour event and it ran very quietly. This is also safer than trying to refuel in the dark from a Gerry can pouring gasoline into a hot generators fuel tank in this tinder dry forested environment. Plus, the circuits for the radio power was on GFCI protected wall sockets on the motor home and provided an additional safety measure for outdoor AC generator powered equipment operation.

Everything was set and ready before the 1800 UTC start time and we checked and rechecked our equipment installations, antenna SWR and station grounding systems. The only thing that didnt function was the network-logging program due to a faulty network interface card on the server. Funny, I dont remember having that sort of problem back in 1958 on my very first Field Day! So we just logged on separate computers, as we had done the year before. We would have to dupe the contacts manually after the event was over, just as we had always done before anyway. No problemo.

Once the Field Day event was on, we found that we could easily hold a frequency with either of our stations and were getting many reports of boy, you guys are loud! This held true, especially on the SteppIR beam throughout the Field Day operation. The switching 180-degree feature on the SteppIR beam worked great and allowed us to work the east and west coast with just a flick of the switch. Heck, with this antenna youre really operating a monobander on each band!

The SSB and CW operating positions were manned almost continuously with varying degrees of success (based on the operators skill level). We introduced many of the newer hams to HF operations and to some new modes of operation. For Larry Nelson, KCYX and Rich Lorenzen, KCLO it was their very first Field Day operation. Fueling interest is key to the future success of Field Day in any organization and I believe we definitely kindled some new interests and gave some of the newer hams a chance at gaining some hands on experience. We even managed to mount a pretty decent Field Day score in the process. Although we did miss our yeoman CW operator from last year, Nick Elias, N3AIU who was operating for some lucky Field Day group in Arizona.

During the Field Day event some DX stations called us and told us we were very loud (S9+10) including a UA3 station in Moscow, a couple of G and M stations in the UK and even Charlie, S9SS in Sao Tome & Principe where he usually has trouble copying low power DX stations due to the strong Equatorial QRN and the receiver front-end overload Charlie contends with from the huge multi-KW broadcast stations nearby. That was impressive, even to our seasoned DXers like Don Hume, KR.

For a demonstration mode Jim Andrews, WAHD set up his portable ATV station and exchanged ATV transmissions with another portable ATV station located at the BARC Juniors (our auxiliary ham radio club for kids from ages 5-17) Field Day site ran by George Kretke, NUX and Doshia Kretke, KBAS. The BARC Juniors were running under the callsign K1D seven miles away and to the east of Boulder, CO. We exchanged ATV pictures and audio with their site while they were busy operating. The kids and their visitors were fascinated with this ATV demo as well. This is a fun demo and visitors watching the video at our site were very impressed with the video quality of the pictures received.

VHF/UHF communications and QSOs were provided by Don Nelson, NGY, a seasoned VHF/UHF contester. Don worked the many nice (but short) 6M openings during the day as well as working many 2M and 70cm Field Day stations around the area on his Moxon arrays.

Dale Scott, KAPV set up his portable packet node and passed some NTS traffic for us. This is a very useful communication mode for us to utilize whenever we have to work on a wildfire. Packet is utilized to handle fire logistics for our served agency. It is always good practice to see what it will take to get the VHF packet signals out of these mountains to other packet nodes along the mountains and eastern plains. Some of the largest wildfires we have been on in the recent past were located within a mile of this present Field Day site. When we do have an actual wildfire, ATV is used by our ARES group to send live wildfire pictures back to Incident Command and downtown to the Boulder Fire Command HQ for our served agency to view and make tactical decisions with. Field Day provided us a chance to practice under typical terrain conditions (minus the fire!).

It has been really dry up in these mountains so far this summer. But, we found a way to create rain and hail. "Become a Rain Maker - just erect an expensive beam on a tall tower, place it on a mountaintop and put a dozen or so hams outdoors with even more expensive and delicate electronic ham gear and add some various lengths of wire and coax running around on the ground.
Right about 5:30 PM local time, we were hit by a fast moving thunderstorm that gave us a great and close lightning show and produced some 45 mile per hour gusts of wind, horizontally blown driving rain and even some pea-sized hail lasting for about an hour. This, in turn, produced much frantic activity at our site trying to keep our equipment and people safe and dry. The antennas rode the storm out in great shape. We lost power when a GFCI breaker worked as it should and popped on the motor home after a power strip got drenched with hail. After it was all over, about an hour later, and everything was dried out, we reset the GFCI breaker and we were back on the air again.

Later on, a sumptuous ribeye steak dinner with all the fixings was prepared skillfully by our Grand Chef, Gary Carroll, WN. The wonderful aroma of steaks cooking on the grill brought us a visit by one of the local inhabitants, a curious (and somewhat rare) gray fox. This brought about many comments from our crew about maybe having a Fox Hunt with a real fox! Later in the wee hours of the morning this same brazen fox decided to join us and jumped up on the table next to the SSB operating position and licked around the plastic cover that was protecting the remnants of the chocolate cake we had for dessert that evening. We got him to leave by telling him how nice his tail would look on our mobile whip antennas! He didnt seem to appreciate that comment and left the campsite holding his prized tail close to his body.

Because this location is on a very well used mountain-hiking trail we had lots of visitors stopping by to see what we were up to. Every one of our club members took a turn to help explain to these hikers and bikers what we were doing, how, and moreover...why? We had taken along some old QST magazines and placed them at our information station along with the ARRL supplied brochures on ham radio and these very interested visitors eagerly took copies to peruse later. Later, some of them stayed around to watch us take down our tower and beam (I think they were taking bets on whether or not it would crash to the ground). But just as we had planned, it came down as safely as it had gone up the day before. What had taken over 3 hours to erect came down in less than 45 minutes! We were all packed and gone within 90 minutes after Field Day ended. A somewhat tired, but happy group. Well begin the planning process for Field Day 2007 next month!
73 DE JACK -- WM