This year Sweepstakes was The Wilson Family Affair. It included Kristin: KC0INX, Carol: KC0MOM, Melissa, Mike Lundy: Kristin’s new husband, and me, Mike: K2KR. We decided to do Sweepstakes this year field day style in West Texas as my Sweepstakes partner and daughter, Kristin, got married this spring to an Air Force Lieutenant and they are stationed at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, TX. When I asked her what we should do about Sweeps this year she suggested that we work it from the West Texas section as that was just a few miles west from where she was living. So we began looking for a place to work from that would be in west Texas. We found a state park that would work great for us, Copper Breaks State Park. It had power, space, showers, and was in West Texas. 

Now, how to work Sweeps field day style and still be competitive??? In the State Park we would only have 120 volts of power, so we had to decide amp or no amp. We decided to use an amp, but smaller than we had in previous years so I rebuilt an old Heathkit SB200 that had been my dads, WB9FNN (sk), and now we had our amp. On to the antennas. I had a Mosley TA 33jr sitting around and brought it back to life. I also made a mount for a mast that could attach to the back of our vehicle so we could put it up at 32 feet. With that we would be able to work 10, 15, and 20 meters. Now for 40 and 80 meters. I ordered a 40 foot portable mast from Spider Beam USA and made a tip-up base plate for it.  A simple dipole for 80 and 40 run in an inverted v fashion was what we used for the upper bands. The 80 meter side worked well, but the switches I had put in to switch between bands did not work very well, so we had some problems with the 40 meter side. Because of this, we ended up working more on 80 meters than we had originally planned. That was not a big deal though as where we were in West Texas where we had a very low noise floor and virtually no man made noise from power lines etc. Copper Breaks is in the middle of nowhere.

We managed to involve the whole family in some fashion or another i.e. cooking, logging help, or helping to get everything set up. We had an op tent like field day to work from, which became a temporary home for several pesky wasps. Since being in a tent full of buzzing wasps is not very favorable to operating a radio where much concentration is required, many of the wasps met their fate with the fly swatter.  Another complication we ran into was some problems with our computer logging software dropping a call as we were working every now and then.  So just to be safe, we did a back up paper log of everything, which meant two people were working in the op tent at most times. It was fun having the family work together so well.

Now how did we do? Well not quite what we had hoped for, but even with some of the problems one can encounter with working FD style we did ok. We logged 814 contacts in just over 19 hours of on-the-air time. We managed to work 78 sections but just could not find or work PR or NWT. We heard both of them just above the noise floor a couple of times, but could not manage to get them to hear and work us. That is the way things go some times.

Overall we had a great family time with our kids and a fun time camping in a new part of the country at a time of year when we are not usually thinking about camping. I would do it again just about any time. It made for a great adventure even if we did not have the best score, what we lacked in score we had in fun. One of the neatest things was when people with automatic logging programs would ask us about the section change from last year, “Yes, we are in West Texas this year, not Colorado.” I don’t know where we will be next year, but we will be back. Be sure to look for us and see where we are and what we are up to next year.

K2KR