Boulder Amateur Radio Club (BARC) - WØDK 

Each and every year for the past 10 years, BARC has set up a 2A Field Day station high above the City of Boulder, Colorado in the Betasso Preserve. The elevation is approximately 6600' ASL. This beautiful location is ideal for an active ham radio club like BARC to hold their Field Day due to the close proximity of the site to the City of Boulder. Due to its location along a very popular hiking and biking trail, it also affords very good public visibility and  accessibility. Despite it's close proximity to the City (6 miles away), it might as well be in the wilderness because all sorts of wildlife abound in this Preserve and many times they have been known to wander into downtown Boulder! On any given day you may see mule deer, red, black or gray fox, coyotes, black bears, bobcats, mountain lions and more recently, even a couple of moose have been spotted in the nearby forest. So, it is imperative that we consider our ' furry neighbors' when we set up our weekend Field Day stations. On Saturday morning, the Forest Rangers were giving a public informational lecture nearby on the local fauna and flora and reminded us that this is the time of the year that black bear cubs are being weaned from their mama's. They advised us to be especially wary of hungry young bears wandering around in search of food. Sure enough, in the late afternoon, we had one visit our SSB tent! No damage was done, and after a quick "shooing", the bear left the area in search of something more edible and digestible than a couple of tough, old, overgrown hams.

The WØDK Field Day stations are well suited for their 2A plus GOTA effort. This is primarily due to the Herculean effort of the BARC Field Day Chairman, Allen, KØARK. He provides the coordination, effort and much of the equipment used on Field Day. Allen, along with the other key members of the Committee, Don, NØYE, Michael, KDØFDJ; Ken, NV5Y; Mike, W3DIF and Gary, WØQN make sure all the nitty-gritty details are taken care of and that Field Day goes off without a hitch. All the rest of the BARC hams and guests need to do is just show up and 'play radio'.

The SSB station consists of a TS-990S into a portable, trailer-mounted 55' retractable tower sporting a 3 element SteppIR beam with the 40M/30M dipole array. The CW station consists of a FT-1000MP Mark-V into a fan dipole strung some 50' above the forest floor. The GOTA station this year was an IC-706 into a very reliable R7 vertical. Powering the stations, tents and the shelter lighting is a very quiet 7Kw Honda generator located some distance away from the operational tents. Both the SSB and CW stations are operated by computer control and Field Day logging software. With these excellent stations on SSB and CW, we rarely need to 'hunt and pounce' for QSOs because we can usually hold a frequency at a very good QSO/hour rate throughout the event. 

The weather cooperated very nicely throughout the weekend. Down in the 'flat lands' due east of us, temperatures were in the mid-90's, but we never saw anything above 78 degrees at Betasso. The evenings were just as pleasant with temps cooling down into the high 60's. During the wee hours of the morning, the temps dropped down to about 50 degrees and a light jacket or sweater were needed in order to be more comfortable. No rain, thunder, lightning, hail, wind or anything else unpleasant appeared at our QTH during the entire weekend. And, because there was a light breeze during the evening hours, we weren't bothered by any pesky, blood-thirsty mosquitos! It just doesn't get any better than this weather-wise for Field Day.

Food is always the main concern of any Field Day group, and the BARC guys and gals are no different. The BARC Club does support us with a nice stipend to provide our mealtime 'vittles'. But, for the past few years, one of our incredibly generous BARC members, who prefers to remain 'anonymous', has donated a very generous amount of cash to our annual Field Day operating budget to make sure we can obtain the finest steaks for our Saturday evening BBQ. He told me that “he did not want to see a hard-working Field Day crew have to eat anything less!” To make certain this all comes together, we have our Grande Chef, Gary Carroll, WØQN and his son, John take care of all of the food and drink logistics and do all of the cooking. No one has ever gone hungry at a BARC Field Day! 

Due to a huge Geomagnetic Storm earlier in the week, the band conditions this Field Day seemed to be generally 'down' in comparison to other recent Field Days, at least as recorded in my ever-diminishing memory bank. One of the more noticeable observations I made was that the raw number of CW stations on the air seemed to be much less than during past years. Perhaps it was band conditions, perhaps it was due to weather related problems in other areas, or are CW operators starting to show up on the 'endangered species' list on their way to eventually becoming extinct? There were some times when I felt that I had 'milked' the entire band of CW QSOs and I know that is rather doubtful. I do know that our veteran BARC CW operators are down to just a few hardy, gray-haired and/or bald-headed souls. But, not to worry! Conversely, our BARC Youth Club, the famous BARC Jrs., have a plentitude of young teenage CW operators at their Field Day site. Maybe it is time for us to make a 'raid' over there and bring a few of them up to the 'senior' site? Perhaps there are more PSK-31 stations replacing the CW stations on Field Day? I don't know for sure, but it is something to ponder as we plan our future Field Day strategy. Despite the adverse band conditions, slow operating and station down times, we still managed a respectable score when all was said and done. WØDK made 1478 SSB contacts, and 434 CW contacts plus about 30 GOTA SSB Q's. Those QSOs, plus the addition of almost a thousand bonus points, gave us a respectable score this year. That is exciting, considering that this was a very casual effort on our part, with no scheduled operators and times or coordinated band changes as we have done in the past.

We always look forward to visits from our City and County officials at our site. This year the City Official who signs our City Park Permit decided to come up and see what we were all about. The City Park Official decided to stay for awhile and sat down and observed our Field Day operation for over 4 hours while some young hams were making QSOs on the air. She was completely enthralled by the operation and the fact that there was youth involvement. Of course, we were pleased that she left with a positive view of our Field Day operation. 

To BARC members, the highlight of the weekend is, and always will be, to meet the new, young hams that visit our site and encourage them to operate for a time. Some of them make their very first HF contact on these Field Day stations! This year was no exception. We were pleasantly surprised and delighted to be joined by some engineering students from nearby Colorado University in Boulder who have recently become hams. In their Engineering Dept., they have a very brilliant professor, Dr. Zoya Popovic, ACØXJ who believes that ham radio can and should be taught as an extra credit to electrical and computer engineering students. Dr. Popovic provides an elective course "Electronics for Wireless Communications", for sophomore electrical and computer engineering majors. She offered this elective class for the first time in spring, 2011 and 40 students (the maximum allowed) enrolled. The goal of the course is to motivate students for later courses in circuits, electromagnetics and communications, while teaching some basic practical and lab skills. The students spend the semester learning about analog electronics through the building of a pcb-based 7-MHz radio. They even learn the fine art of soldering, just like we did... one burn at a time! For their final exam, they take the Technician and General Amateur Radio test and get their licenses. Some have even passed their Extra Class license exam. To date, over 60 C.U. engineering students have passed their license exams with BARC members providing the licensing courses and their VE team. Usually, all of the student-built 7-MHz radios work and can receive Morse code from a CW beacon (this is where some of the students learn what cold-solder joints are). Many of these students have subsequently become active members of the Boulder Amateur Radio Club too! This year, several of these same students, some of which are currently enrolled in their PhD studies at the College, decided to come up to Betasso Preserve and work from the WØDK BARC station on Field Day. Many of these students are foreign-born and the concept of a ham radio Field Day simply does not exist in their homelands. This is a unique opportunity for them. More than one student told me during the weekend that this Field Day operation was a 'ham radio dream come true'. What more could you possibly ask for from your Field Day efforts?