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My Personal Field Day

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Waiting here in Florida for our missionary visa’s to be issued, Paula (KD8OZU) and I feel stranded and remote, even on a military base. No car means we would not be able to even visit a local group on Field Day. I still wanted to participate and test out my rig with the G5RV antenna I purchased just prior to leaving Ohio. Unfortunately, base regulations prohibit me from having the antenna up for any length of time, but a Saturday/Sunday would not be an issue.

So we started looking around for a location that would be acessible by the camp van I use, sufficiently spaced and height trees to string the antenna between, electrical power, shelter and visibility. We found a workable area near the base beach but had to sacrifice the shelter requirement. 

(pictures can be seen at http://picasaweb.google.com/macguru.york/PersonalFieldDay)

Getting the stringer line over the top of the palm trees proved to be more strenuous than I estimated. I use a rock tied to nylon clothesline rope and just tried “slinging” it over the top, but aiming and height proved to be quite challenging. After about 45 minutes I finally succeeded in getting both ends of the line just where I wanted and becoming thoroughly drenched in sweat in the process. As I went to tie the rope to the insulators on the ends of the antenna, I found it was too large to fit. So I did some looking around and found discarded ends of weed trimming line. Fed through the insulator hole twice, it held tightly and ended up working very well with the stringer line tied through it. (Score one for scavenging!) The line ran fairly true east to west.

The rest of the setup was fairly routine. I connected the radio to the van battery for power, and had an extension line for powering the laptops. Weather seems to change on a dime here on the Gulf coast, so I strung up a tarp over my gear just in case (and it paid off since we did get a brief shower Saturday evening.)

My goal was just to make some contacts and practice using the radio in both phone and digital modes. Over 6 hours on Saturday I was able to make 9 phone contacts, 7 on 20m and 2 on 40m; and 6 digital contacts, PSK31 on 20m. Coming back on Sunday, I managed one more phone contact and 12 digital contacts on 20m. A total of 28 contacts, covering 17 states, one Canadian Providence and one Mexican contact. My furthest contact was in Washington, both with digital and phone (separate individuals).

I still have much to learn about my IC-706mkIIg, but being able to spend dedicated time with specific goals helped tremendously. I would encourage any rookie hams to actively seek out more experienced members to “elmer” them. I would also hope that the more experienced operators would take some time to work with new hams. You may experience some of that “thrill” you yourself had when you started!

73’s

Randall York, member on a “mission.”