06/25/2007 | AB8XX Field Day: One of the best days of the year.

This was my 5th FD and 2nd as a solo op. I operated as a 1B-OH QRP Battery. Even with the solar flux being low and no sunspots, 5 watts still did a good job. 40 and 80m is where I had the best luck this year. Operation turned out to be half SSB and half PSK31 contacts. I am working on improving my CW skills and speed and will probably use CW next year.

The antenna in the photos is a W3FF Buddipole on a 16' mast with a 2m/440 mobile antenna mounted at the top. The Buddipole always works great. I removed the standard whips for 80m operation and attached 33' of wire and tapped the coils for resonance. It works surprisingly well and is very compact. For 40m I removed the tapped coils and antenna arms and connected the 33' wires to the center feed point. The rig was an FT-817ND and everything was powered from a large AGM lead acid battery. While not on HF, I connected the dual band antenna up to the rig and had a VHF Packet node operating and also used a Winlink2000 Telpac node to send some emails via Packet. It would not be FD without Radiograms so I checked into 2 80m Traffic nets and one 2m net and handled some messages.

Overall things went well this year and I am already looking forward to next year. -- AB8XX