07/15/2008 | W0CBH Well, another great event finished. The following members of the Franktown Field Day group met again at the Franktown Auxlilary Fire Station just east of Franktown, Colorado. N0NDM, W0CBH, WG0E, N0LP, KC0UUO, W9CN, KC0D, and KB9UNG participated again this year. We also had two other hams that were driving by and stopped to see what was going on. One came back Saturday and operated for several hours. Mike's (W9CN) heir apparent even participated. Russ KA0ULN stopped on his way home Friday evening to drop off ICOM 756 pro we used and stayed for dinner. We started setup at 12:06 pm Friday afternoon and finished arund 5:00 pm. Just in time to start our dinner. We had guests, Marcia KC0SOW, her 93 year old mother, and Paula, Marks wife. After dinner Nick N0LP gave a presentation on PSK31 and RTTY using the ICOM 746 and his interface. The die hard over nighters stayed and several of us went home to our comfortable beds, ha!

Saturday morning Larry N0NDM made breakfast for all, and we finished setting up the 6 and 2 meter stations when Colin WG0E arrived. When the contest began we were shocked at the pile ups we experienced. The self errecting tower had our beam at 80 feet whcih gave us great propigation. Signal reports of over 10 over 9 and better with just 100 watts were passed back to us. The 80 and 40 meter dipole didn't work so well, so we started to lower the beam tower and it stuck at 35 feet. Wow, stuck and what do we do? Rob, KC0UUO figured out what we needed to do to get the sections of the tower to properly rotate and mesh and we were able to lower it and fix the dipole and then raise it up to 80 feet again. We erected a pushup pole off to the side of the station and attached a single element dipole for 20, 15, and 10 meters and added a G5RV antenna for station 2.

Well, off to the races. The weather was nice, not too warm, and the usual thunderstorm had gone thru Friday evening, so the weather was great Saturday and Sunday. We had dinner around 6:00 pm and KC0UUO and wife did a great job with the Italian style fare. The die hards stayed on the air until 2:00 am Sunday morning and then hit the hay. I began the early morining shift on Sunday morning at 4:00 am. This is the best time to operate as far as I am concerned. Eveyone is tired, and sleepy and the phonetics your hear for each call sain can get pretty graphic. We had 375 contacts at 7:00 am on Sunday and finished the contest with 724 or so. Not bad work for the last 5 hours. Nick N0LP and Rob KC0UUO really made the contactsusing the 756 pro and the beam at 80 feet. Lessons learned were to have the proper length of coax for the antennas, too short and they won't tune up. We had extra long coax so they worked well.

Tear down started at noon and we were finsihed by 2:30, one hour earlier than last year. Marty WA0GEH was not able to operate with us this year, but he did come out at 11:00 am Sunday and stayed to help us tear down. Thanks Marty. We captured 500 bonus points and had a great time. We were able to copy the arrl message via psk31. We are getting better at bring the minimum amount of gear to accomplish the event. We had more visitors this year, and several promised to return next year and stay thru the entire event. Hopefully they will, and maybe we will get a cw op even.

I wish to thank the team and look forward to next year. Mike N0MPM a previous member of the team for many years had moved to Iowa over the winter and we missed him terribly. He was able to gather several hams in the Pella, Iowa area and operated the event. AS far as I know we didn't contact them until after the event. He said he really enjoyed the 20 minute tear down with the other group, ha!

I want to thank Scott Owen again this year for his great field day software package. We used the network version again this year with no problems whatever. It made the contact logging easy.

73's until next year, Benjie W0CBH. -- W0CBH