ONE FOR THE AGES!
First of all I’d like to thank everyone that helped in this years field day. The success that we achieved this year was only due to the clubs outstanding group effort as we had 40 club members sign the roster. Again we decided to operate using the club call, W1DDD, with a 2A (Two transmitters, Club portable) designation along with a GOTA (Get On The Air) station which was run by Mickey, K1WMC. Our preliminary score was a whopping 7,497 points!!! Most of the contacts came from the CW/SSB station (1358 QSO’s) but the FT8 station had some awesome numbers as well (289 QSO’s). The GOTA station, using the call NA1Q, made 67 contacts. Not counting the GOTA station we had 1647 QSO’s and when all was said and done the club made a whopping 1714 QSO’s! Thanks to everyone who operated! I went back 16 years of field day scores and we surpassed the clubs previous best effort by almost 1500 points. Truly a field day for the ages! Bonus points played a big factor in our score this year. The club achieved 1605 bonus points as we were able to maximize bonus scoring in all but four categories. We’ll aim for a clean sweep of all the available bonus points this year.
We started off on the Friday before with some initial setup including getting lines up in the trees and hanging antennas. Randy, K5ZD, and his crew erected a 30 foot temporary tower that had the clubs tri-bander mounted on top. This was shared between the CW/SSB station and the FT8 station by using the clubs triplexer and band pass filters. It still amazes me how this hardware can make it so three stations can use the same antenna simultaneously. For the lower bands we used an 80 meter doublet for the CW/SSB station and a 4010 EFHW (End Fed Half Wave) antenna for the FT8 station. The GOTA station used the old reliable fan dipole. Unfortunately Saturday morning the weather didn’t cooperate with us as we had to deal with a downpouring of rain which made station setup that much more challenging. By the time lunch rolled around the weather was finally cooperating. I guess that’s what field day is all about, operating in any and all environments and conditions. Thankfully the weather for the actual operating portion of field day was awesome although it got a little chilly Saturday night.
Thanks to everyone who brought food for the traditional pot luck dinner Saturday night and a huge thank you to Jim, K1GND, and Anne Johnson for donating the always awesome sandwiches and treats for lunch. Sunday morning/afternoon we had cake for Bob, W1YRC, who just retired from 21 years of service as RI section manager and Randy, K5ZD, who celebrated his 50th year of being licensed. I’d also like to thank Judson, W1JMZ, for pulling together and submitting all the scoring. Great job! Special thanks to Paul, KC1IEN, for the use of his camper. It sure was nice to have a place to relax and catch some shut eye. I’d also like to thank Martin, AA1ON, one of our newest members who was only a guest during the event but was there for setup and take down as well as several hours of operating. The first ever BVARC scholarship was awarded Sunday morning and as luck would have it my son Benjamin was the recipient. He’s a freshman at WPI this year. Sure helps when you’re the only applicant! Thank you from my entire family.
I hope everyone enjoyed field day as much as I did. It was my honor to have been the chairman of the field day committee and it was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be with all the help and support I received from everyone. I can’t wait to do it again! Being my first year I thought it went quite well but there surely was a learning curve on my part. My competitive nature wants me to break 10,000 points this year but we’ll leave it up to the field day committee on what our goals will be for the upcoming 2024 event. One final thought is I’d like to mention how excited I was assisting Evan, KC1SOC, and his dad make their first HF contacts. The look on Evans face when he made his first contact brought me back to a time when I was just 10 years old and discovering the magic of this awesome hobby. For me that was the highlight of the whole weekend. Again, one for the ages!
Mark – KW1X
Field Day Committee Chair
Courtesy of “The Messenger” October 2022