06/30/2009 | W0MXW Again this year, the Rochester Amateur Radio Club threw its Field Day bash at the Cahills farm near Rochester. The QRP group used the club call W0MXW, in a separate 2A-Battery entry so that we could get the 5x power multiplier, while the main group used the call W0BM in a much bigger 100 watt 3A entry (see the W0BM comments separately). Some pictures showing both setups are at www.rarchams.org .

Our big adventure this year was building a HexBeam. We wanted to go cheap, so we used crappie poles and stuff we had around, and put it up on a 50 ft push-up pole. It was an elegant design, but the base plate proved to be under-engineered (my design....), and it had to be patched both before and after mounting on the mast. Still, it worked amazingly well. This was the first time I had used a beam of any kind in QRP, and I was greatly impressed. With the beam, most people heard us first call, and usually didnt need any repeats. Even on SSB, we could be heard. We had dipoles in the trees for 40 and 80, and they worked, but not as well.

We still havent figured out how to achieve a decent rate, but we did lots better than last year. We ended up with 231 QSOs, mostly CW, to 55 sections, spread all over Washington, Florida, Vermont, San Diego, and even Alaska and Hawaii. The weather was perfect, the food was good, and everybody had a great time. -- N8MHD