[CTSARA] Preliminary Field Day Report

[Jon Perelstein]

We thought we should give the club a preliminary look at our Field Day
performance.

As many of you know, this was not as good a year in terms of propagation.
 6 meters was dead, 10 meters was deader than dead, and 15 was noisy and
blah at best.  Even 20, 40, and 80 had their limits (although we did work
Hawaii and Alaska this year, but once again no Manitoba).

On top of that, we were in a sense victims of our own successes (past and
current):

- Six of the people who ran up big scores for us in GOTA two years ago as
non-hams and who also ran up big scores for us in GOTA last year as newly
licensed hams are now no longer eligible for GOTA.  While we have some
newly licensed hams and hams-to-be who will and are stepping into their
shoes, they were big shoes to fill and we this was a re-building year in
that respect.

- A lot of the myriad of visitors we had over the weekend weren't terribly
interested in operating because they really wanted to talk about ham radio
-- for example, the public service/emergency management people who came to
see us and even most of the new hams, inactive hams, and hams-to-be.  We're
not going to complain too much given that the primary goal of the GOTA tent
is to attract new hams/inactive hams/hams-to-be and we have been wildly
successful at that (probably one of the best in the country).

As some of you have already figured out, all this verbiage is intended to
prepare you for some bad news -- it looks like we're going to come in about
the same as last year.  Maybe 100 points more, maybe 50 points less, but we
didn't have the big increase that we've had each of the past couple of
years.  Of course, given the band conditions, coming in same as last year
is well, errrr, ummmm, I don't know, it's hard to say, but might best be
described as freakin spectacular.  Yes, that's about right.  F R E A K I N
  S P E C T A C U L A R.

Psyche -- thought I was going to say something different, didn't you?

The especially bright spots were

-  CW, where Andy and Leonid increased their point performance by about
20%, and
-  3A digital, where we saw a major major increase in point production

3A phone was down a bit because we had one of the 3A phone stations off the
air part of the time to allow 3A digital operations, but on a
points-per-operating hour basis, 3A phone actually improved its performance
over last year despite the band conditions.

The only not bright spots were VHF (yucccck is about the best description),
and GOTA where point production was down because of fewer QSOs (see above)
and because it did far less digital than last year.

We should have the final numbers in a day or two, but we have to tell you
-- you folks did an incredible job and we thank you for it.

73s
Jon, for the Board