On Saturday, I participated in the ARRL Field Day for the first time. For those who don’t know, Field Day is a annual event where Amateur Radio operators head out to fields, forests, and mountain tops to make as many contacts as possible in 24 hours. The idea is to operate off of emergency and battery power for as long as possible, but this is not always how it’s done.
So, John Core (KX7YT) and I went out to the Hillsboro Trap and Skeet club to set up a station in the parking lot. John had a travel trailer with an awning, which worked very well. We put up a 160-10m fan dipole on a 40-foot fiberglass pole at one end. On top of the trailer, John had a 20-10m vertical dipole. We took turns with each antenna while operating because the fan dipole was clearly the better one.
I took and used my ICOM IC-718, AT-7000, and my 80 AHr battery. I was on battery power for almost the whole event (well, the six hours of it that I worked) but plugged into my power supply for a bit to juice up the battery a bit. It all worked pretty well, and I was pleased with the contacts I made, considering the poor propagation conditions of late. The farthest west I made it was Alaska, the farthest east was Tennessee, and the north-south winner was Alberta, Canada.
In total, I made 37 contacts in six hours. This includes several breaks to rest the ears and shovel in some food. Of those, twelve were new (or interesting) locations for me, to which I sent QSLs. I have never (in my life) packed and sent so many envelopes at once. Each got a card, and a self-addressed stamped envelope. My neighbors must have thought I was starting a junkmail business when I walked to the mailbox with the stack:
The destinations were: AK(2), ID, UT. MT, TN, AZ, TX, MN, NV, British Columbia, and Alberta.