Field Day 2009

Another Field Day has come and gone. I always take off the Monday following Field Day to recuperate from having worked the night shift and done a bit more physical activity than I am used to. I rode back to Codorus to make sure there weren’t any complaints or problems when they locked up. I also made sure they have us on the books for next year. It’s a nice laid back day, a chance to start the report, prepare the submission, and just reflect on the weekend.

While I’m thinking about it, you should mark your calendars now to save the date for next year. I know many of you have very busy calendars. Field Day 2010 will be June 26^th and 27^th.

The number I like to count is how many members and family visited the site, since it is our combined picnic, field day, and friendly get together. I counted about 32 people who visited which is about average so I’m satisfied with that.  I may have missed a few, but dinner Saturday night before the fireworks is generally a pretty good time to get a headcount, thanks to the gourmet food so carefully prepared by Master Chef Dave January and his trusty apprentice Jules. We had 15 different operators according to the log, one more than last year.

For 2009 we operated as 4A again. Our score this year was 2206 which is down quite a bit from last year’s score of 2590 (which by the way was down 200 from the year before). Part of the reduction is they took away the demo mode 100 pt bonus last year. They replaced it with an educational activity that just didn’t materialize this year despite 3 different possibilities we talked about. I had everything with me to build a Winlink 2000 station as an activity, but there just wasn’t time to do it. Well, we’ve never really been about points anyway. We made 510 contacts as opposed to 665 last year, so our score was down there too. Largely due to not having our young guns, 40 meters was awful at night and it’s usually hopping, and non of the bands really opened to much of the West.

We’ll talk about things we liked and didn’t like at the meetings and in emails. Things we might want to do different, etc, but not here. The following pages summarize everything.

My special thanks to those who helped with setup and teardown. Setup was rough.  We got a very late start, the people in the triathlon were all around when we got there, the tables were missing from the building, we had forgotten a few things, and we were very short handed at setup. For the first hour or two there was only 5 of us, and 2 were setting up the food. WRT to the tables, I had confirmed they were there just a week before, but the staff had grabbed all but one for the Blast. The Park Manager apologized for the mix up. There wasn’t anything he could do at that point, so Nate brought two tables and Dave January gave us one of the two or three he brought for food. So it worked out ok in the end. 

The weather was great. It was warm on Saturday but very windy to keep you cool. It got down right chilly at night, and I don’t get chilly easily. I felt the first drops of rain as we finished unloading at the repeater site, Dave January’s (Dave is storing the tower for us), and finally at home.

 It was great seeing everyone. I hope to see all of you again soon and some newcomers too.

Final Screen

The screen shot below is the final screen of what we had been looking at all weekend long. I really like the N3FJP networked logging software. We get real time reports, it backs up automatically, stores the data on one machine as a server, and backs it up to the others for safety. My favorite features are that it automatically warns you about dupes and fills in the class and section automatically once a station has been seen on one of the other bands or modes.  Here’s a neat feature I learned about last year, but forgot about again this year. Sooner or later, I’ll remember.  It’s not necessary to tab across the call, class, and section fields unless the call sign happens to have a slash, “/” in it. If you contacted me, N3GL and I was working 1D from the MDC section, you could simply type the characters “N3GL1DMDC”.  It recognizes the start of the class field and the start of the section field automatically and tabs over for you. Very cool until you fat finger something and find yourself typing in a different field by mistake.

Section Map

Communications to the western half of the country never really materialized the way it normally does. Not even on 40 or 80 at night. Nevertheless, we hit a lot of the different sections across the country, as you see at right. If it’s colored we talked to it. We didn’t get Alaska which is hidden, but Nate did hear it.

Here’s the graph of contacts per hour computed every 10 minutes (time is UTC). We generally have a big lull for fireworks, which you see at about 0100. The night crew did pretty well. We had a few other times when things were really slow. Want to bet food was involved? 

Summary by Band and Operator:

15 different people made contacts this year. That’s one more than last year. Like I said, the night crew did pretty well. 

I can’t take credit for taking any of them unfortunately. One of the things I forgot was my camera. Ugh!

Our littlest Ham Conner January is 13 months old.  I had personal best 150 contacts and I’m not saying if Conner helped. I know it’s hard to believe, but he sends CW as well as I do. (Maybe that’s not so hard to believe if you really know me.)  I guess the fact that I finally got up the courage to call CQ Field Day for the first time might have helped too. I actually think that’s what kept me awake all night. It really keeps you jumping.