Field Day 2010

Operating just for fun....




Due to construction of a new building on what was our Field Day site at the HBO Communications Center, the HBO/SPARC Field Day was canceled this year. We were invited to join the Great South Bay Amateur Radio Club but I decided to stay home, fool around and see what my own station could do.

The rear operating position in the station set up for Field Day.

Left - My netbook was set up with a "freebee" logging program.
Right - Another view of the operating position.

The transceiver used is an ICOM IC-745 fed with audio from my studio audio processing chain. The Marshall MXL-2003 microphone along with the DBX 163X, Berhinger MDX-1400 and Inovonics 222 audio processors kept the modulation up there with no distortion.

On Saturday 40 meters looked liked a good place to be but I could only get a 5 1/2 to 1 vswr on that band. I knew the antenna was short. Not wanting to move to my upstairs station, which has a 40 meter dipole, I decided to check out 20 meters.

The antenna on 20 meters is an old Cushcraft tri-band vertical. The antenna is mounted on an old TV antenna tripod anchored to the ground. Three guy lines also stabelize the antenna. Two copper radials and the grounded chain link fence make up the ground system. Using this set up I worked 9 contacts at an easy pace in a little over an hour. Then I broke for dinner with some friends and never came back that evening.

The tri-band vertical mounted on the TV tripod in the back yard.

The antenna grounded to the fence. Copper wire joins the 2 pieces of fence across the gate.


Suday at noon edt I got on 3.920 MHz to see if anybody from the Orange County Amateur Radio Club had shown up for the usual net. After talking to Phil, KC2DXM I decided to take a look around the band. At first look 75 meters seemed dead but not so. I easily worked 14 more stations including W1AW who had about the strongest signal I ever heard on 75 meters. Normally 10db over S9 is a pretty good signal on my tight S meter. W1AW was 30 db over S9. Antenna on this band is a dipole.

This year I operated Field Day a few hours just for fun. Who knows about next year.




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