07/23/2009 | WV0H Last on the air in 2006, The South Park Marauders once again convened for another installment of ARRL Field Day. We went to our usual site at the north end of South Park in Colorado, in the Pike National Forest.

All in attendance were thrilled that not one rain drop had landed during the entire weekend as it seems in years past that we always got rained out when setting up and tearing down.

The antenna farm grew this year adding dedicated dipoles for 20, 40 and 75 meters. Dean, K0MKT, added to the FD cache this year with his Honda eu2000i (which he purchased from Mayberrys and the nice ARRL discount), a 12 meter Spiderbeam fiberglass pole, SGC-237 tuner and individual band ICE band pass filters! This year we networked the computers together, wow, what a difference not having to flip through dupe sheets. We used N3FJPs logging software. I decided to try a split antenna approach on 20 meters with an inverted vee up 30 feet on a Jackite fiberglass pole for transmit and a 2 element 20 meter half wave phased array on receive. This proved to be invaluable because of the 100 Watts on transmit always radiating in the same direction and having the ability to receive in different directions.

Thanks to Dean, Tim and Ken and all who made this a very special event. -- WV0H