West Valley Amateur Radio Assoc:  Field Day is a great opportunity to get outdoors, gain experience assembling equipment in the rough, and operate a station under challenging band conditions.  This year we operated QRP in the 7A Battery from Mora Hill overlooking Los Altos, California, from an elevation of 500 feet. 

 There's plenty of preparation that goes into Field Day before the first radio contact ever occurs.  That’s part of the overall experience as well.  Field Day also provides “improvisational opportunities”, since Murphy invariably shows up and nothing ever goes quite as expected.

 And of course, being outdoors means that we get to put up wild-n-crazy antennas that our spouses and neighbors might never allow back home.  And with Field Day, you're doing this amongst a great set of old and new friends! This year we had 3 HF CW stations, 3 HF SSB stations, an HF digital station, a GOTA station, and a VHF station.  Our CW operators actually worked 49 out of 50 the states.  (Where was Delaware?)

 Last year, Gary (K6KV) brought two homebrew HF triplexers that allowed us to simultaneously share each HF tribander between three stations running on 10- 15- and 20 meters.  We used this triplexer approach again this year with great success.  If you’d like to build one for your club, you can read all about how to do it in the June 2010 issue of QST. 

Svend (KF6EMB) deployed a helium balloon-supported full-wavelength loop antenna on 80 meters.  Theis antenna is based on WU0I’s award-winning QST article from July 2007, and give new meaning to that old 5th Dimension song from the 1960s: “Up, Up and Away with my Beautiful Balloon.” 

In spite of the limited sunspots, 15 meters was surprising productive – especially on Sunday morning.  And although 20 meters went dormant during the late-night hours, 40 and 80 meters kept us busy throughout the graveyard shift.  (Refer to our hourly QSO rate graph.)

In addition to having a great time, each year we work at improving our equipment, antennas and operating skills.  As a result, we have succeeded at significantly boosting our Field Day score each of the past six years.  Last year found us ranked #12 in the US and Canada out of over 2500 Field Day participants. This year we hope to do even better.