[HCARC] Winter Field Day

[Gary J - N5BAA]

Those that came for Winter Field Day yesterday had a good day – at least once we figured out how to get the station radios to transmit.  That said – I confirmed I really love Elecrafts and Yaesu’s, am ambivalent about Icoms, and confirmed I HATE Kenwoods.  Larry Altman and I got several good hours of Mic time, almost all calling CQ and running calls (we had about 110 QSO’s in 3 hours.  Tony Moore got some good logging time, some Mic time (he was shy calling CQ) and some valuable training time from Gale Heise on the finer points of using receiving functions on Tony’s Yaesu FT-450AT.  Terry H showed up later for moral support.  Robert Russell got some good CW time calling CQ.

Lessons learned were that we still need to do something with the antennas and operating stations at the club IF we plan to operate contests, emergency conditions from there.  We are still hamstrung with daytime operations (20,15,10)  being confined to one antenna thus one radio and one operator.  The antenna problem is so bad that even with the station Icom 746 on 40m and the Kenwood on 15 meter CW, there was significant bleed over / splatter (?) from the 15m CW onto the 40 m SSB via the 40m antenna.  We need to figure out if having the club tower trailer there with a beam antenna would allow one station to work another band with the beam antenna having the club antenna situated off the side of the beam antenna.  Another idea and question would be can two beams maybe 250-300 feet apart operate side by side without interference??  I have a set of band pass filters we can use.  One way or another, something has to improve before next Field Day.

73,

Gary J
N5BAA