2016 ARRL Field Day Soapbox comments

This year, we in the Wayne Amateur Radio Club decided to do our Field Day operation a little differently.

We’ve gone out in the field and done our portable operations for a lot of years; this year we thought that, in relation to the emergency-preparedness aspect of this “contest,” we should acknowledge the fact that in real emergencies, there is just as much likelihood that there will be occasions where we will need to operate from home under emergency conditions as there is the occasion to operate in the field.

With that in mind, this year we set up at the home station of K8AJS and operated for 24 hours under emergency power (K8AJS has a home natural gas generator that runs automatically in the event of power failure). This is a possible condition for future emergency operation, so we thought it should be recognized. (Also, none of us are getting any younger, and of course we recognized the benefits of less setup and take-down time and energy…:-))

I’ve gotten away from WriteLog and have been using N1MM+ for contesting this year, but we decided to use WriteLog for this contest, because of the past history of club Field Day operations which have used WriteLog for a lot of years, thus the benefit of software experience of the club members seemed to be there.

The operation was deemed to be a success, we all enjoyed ourselves, made a lot of contacts, and proved to ourselves that emergency operation was possible while still having a reasonable amount of comfort.

An interesting finding: in past years, 40 meters has always been the “money band” where we found we could make the most contacts, but this year that wasn’t so much the case (although we did make a good number of contacts on 40). I had my most fun on 20 meter CW, where the contacts just kept coming for the time that I spent there (we budgeted our time to get the most benefit from the two transmitters, and we did our best to be where the conditions were best, when they were best).

That’s the story of the weekend, a good time was had by all. Thanks to all of you for the contacts!

Rigs: Elecraft K3 / P3, Yaesu FT991, 100 watts

Antennas: 160-meter Inverted L, 204-foot G5RV, 40-meter dipole, 3-element quad

Software: WriteLog v11.23L