07/14/2008 | W0DK The Boulder Amateur Radio Club (BARC) http://www.qsl.net/w0dk/ held its annual 2A Field Day operation using the club callsign, WK for the fourth year in a row up at Betasso Preserve just west of Boulder, Colorado on a beautiful mountain Field Day site at about 6,600'. It gives our HF antennas great launch angles at very high elevations. Being 1,500 ft. above Boulder also changes the climate a bit. While it was 80 degrees in Boulder, the temperature at our site was a very cool 68. Saturday night, we were really cold and had to break out the parkas and blankets because the mountain temperatures fell to a not-so-balmy 40 degrees!

Our hard-working and well-organized Field Day Chairman, John Reilly, WFR, coordinated this event again. Betasso is on a mountaintop, just west of Boulder, on the north side above Boulder Creek at an elevation of 6,600 feet. The Betasso Preserve lies within the northeast corner of the Colorado Mineral Belt, in an area surrounded by abandoned gold and tungsten mines. Here wildlife abounds. Chances of sighting mule deer, elk, black bear, mountain lions, coyotes and gray fox are very good. Last year we had a black bear hanging around. This year we just saw mule deer near our site.

There is a core group of ten BARC club members (some new, some old) who organize our Field Day, set up the stations and antennas, and are usually there for the 24-hour duration of the event. This year we had an additional 21 hams and/or visitors show up to operate and enjoy eyeball QSOs over the span of Field Day.

Many thanks to Larry Nelson, KCYX who again provided transportation and logistics for rounding up the heavy metal and getting it to and from Betasso.

This year, BARC was invited to be interviewed on KGNU-FM in Boulder, CO and tell the public about ARRL Field Day. Jack, WM and David Stearns, KCDR from the BARC Youth Auxiliary club the BARC Juniors, were asked questions about Field Day and what we were doing and why we do it. This was a good opportunity for us to tell our story about BARCs involvement with Boulder Countys Emergency Communications.


The Boulder Amateur Radio Club has seen a very good increase in its membership during the past year primarily due to the hard work of our BARC VEs and ham radio class Elmers who actively recruit these newly licensed hams. Because of this, we expected this year to have increased interest and participation on Field Day And we did! We even signed up two more members on Field Day. Many of these newly licensed hams had told us they have never operated on HF and were looking forward to participating on this Field Day to get some experience with antennas, towers, HF radios, CW and SSB, etc..


We ended up with 804 SSB and 741 CW contacts (including VHF/UHF and GOTA). Our Claimed Score was 4,572 points plus 1,220 Bonus points for a total point count of 5,792 points, which should put us in the top 10% of all Nationwide Field Day operations. This score is nearly 400 points better than our last years score. Ken Long, NO and Larry Benko, WE and many other BARC Field Day ops worked the SSB station very hard and long and had peak run rates of up to 200 QSOs/hour! John Reilly, WFR; Larry Benko, WE; John Bredehoft, KTC and Jack Ciaccia, WM provided the bulk of the CW QSOs.

We also had the HF GOTA station set up for use by visitors and the new-to-HF ham operators. The GOTA SSB transceiver was provided by Chester Shans, K6PUO a great working Ten-Tec Omni VII. The GOTA station antenna was a multi-band dipole strung up in the pine trees at 40 feet. Jack, WM, was the mentor of this station in order to teach new operators how to make HF SSB contacts, etc. It was fun to see how excited Betty Grebe, KDHT was after making her very first-ever two HF SSB contacts! The same with new member Bill Smith, KCTO who made a few 15M SSB contacts. A young 10-year old girl named Maria stopped by and showed an interest and we were able to get her to make her first ever radio contact. She did not want to leave. Yeoman work on the GOTA Station was done by Glenn Hetchler, WBKT and Jerry Huffman, KC8SKJ. They both hit the bonus for having over 20 QSOs each in succession. Great job! A total of 59 contacts were made this year on the GOTA station. Glenns son, Sam Hetchler, KG6HXM made quite a few QSOs on his own and was a great help to us setting up the tarps, etc

WK antennas again this year on the run stations were BARCs 3-element SteppIR beam on a 40 ft. tower and an Extended Zepp wire antenna at 45 ft. The Zepp was fed with 450-ohm ladder line to a Johnson "Match-Box" tuner. This year our CW and SSB HF rigs were the brand new Elecraft K3 Transceivers belonging to club members, Ken Long, NO and John Reilly, WFR. They both performed flawlessly and were a breeze to operate. I am sure they are both well broken in after this 24-hour event. Logging was done on a wireless network created by John Reilly using laptop computers and running the N3JFP network logging program.

The dipole and Extended Zepp were strung up in the tall pine trees with the traditional well-aimed slingshot/fishing reel combo catapulting their fine lines over tall tree limbs and the heavier antenna lines were brought up behind them. We got the dipole strung up to about 40 high and oriented it east/west. The Extended Zepp was a bit higher at about 45 and also broadsided east/west. Both antennas played extremely well throughout the event.

Allen Bishop, KRK brought along his new 5.7 kW generator and it supplied very dependable and very clean 110 VAC power throughout the event. A back-up 5kw generator was on standby provided to us by Will Crary, NWZ. AC power was never a problem.

The combination of the mountain top location, plus the 3-element SteppIR beam antenna allowed WK to capture and hold any frequency or allowed us to hunt and pounce at will. Most of the Field Day contacts were made on 20, 40 and 80 meters. Early Sunday morning, we experienced two good band openings on 10 and 15 meters. During these times, our QSO rate was around 200 QSOs/hour! The workhorse bands though were 20M and 40M, as usual. Almost all contacts were within continental North America. WK worked every ARRL Section in the USA and nearly all sections in Canada during the course of the event and even worked a few DX stations in Australia, Mexico and Argentina. In addition to our two HF stations, we also had a VHF/UHF station operated by veteran Rover Don Nelson, NE.

Dale Scott, KAPV our Colorado ARES District 11 Assistant EC, set up a portable packet node and passed several NTS messages for us to the Central Colorado Traffic Net and passed on by their NCS, Ed Schlicting, KBVH. Packet 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. Field Day provides us a chance to practice under typical terrain conditions (minus the fire!). Dale also provided a Packet Radio Course to about 12 very interested hams, some who had traveled all the way up here from Denver, specifically for the Packet Radio course BARC had advertised.

Our VP and Field Day Chef, Gary, WN, once again did a great job on the grill Saturday evening and provided a nice breakfast Sunday morning with lots of extra fixings for sandwiches and snacks throughout the event. Certainly, no one ever goes hungry at this Field Day site. Even a few of the local touring bicyclists on the trailhead stopped by to see what we were doing and BARC members graciously provided them with some bottled water.

Because this location is on a very well used mountain-hiking and biking trail, we have many visitors stopping by to see what we are up to. All 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 some ARRL supplied brochures on ham radio and these very interested visitors eagerly took copies to peruse later. On Sunday, a few 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, the site cleaned and gone within 90 minutes after Field Day ended. A somewhat tired, but happy group. A great time was had by all.

If none of this was enough, BARCs Youth Auxiliary Club, known as the BARC Juniors held their own Field Day operation several miles away using the call sign, ACW. This call belongs to the latest BARC Junior who became an Extra Class operator, Karthik Kumar Rao. All but one of the 27 BARC Junior operators managed at least one contact during Field Day and in total, they managed 549 total QSOs.
BARC Junior Elmers were there to assist the young operators in the set up of their towers, antennas and equipment. Many of these BARC Juniors are new to ham radio and this was a great opportunity to learn about HF radio operating. A class was given on building twin lead J-Poles and many of these young hams went home with their brand new homemade 2-meter antenna.
All of the kids parents showed up during this event and many camped over at this beautiful lakefront site.

One of the highlights of this Field Day was that many of the Alumni BARC Juniors (over the age of 18) of this 16 year old Youth Ham Radio Club came back to help their young counterparts. One of the graduate BARC Junior Alumni even brought along his new baby daughter! We are now into a second generation of BARC Juniors. There have been over 180 people licensed in 16 years through the BARC Junior program. Who would have thought that this BARC Amateur Radio Youth organization would be so wildly successful? Overall, over 103 people attended their Field Day site this year and 73 of those were there for the BARC Juniors famous potluck supper on Saturday night.

If you did not participate, you missed one of BARC's major operating events of the year. We hope you plan to participate at the WK Field Day in 2009!
73 DE JACK -- WM0G