2010 W0AK Field Day

I’ve been a bit slow in posting about Field Day, partly because I spent most of Sunday catching up on sleep, worked all day Monday, finished the Field Day video Tuesday night, and still haven’t started editing the still photos. Anyways… I produced a short video again this year of things happening at our Field Day site. The Vimeo video is embedded above, and is also available in sub-optimal quality at YouTube. I think I still like last year’s video better, but I was able to get set-up and antenna raising into the video this year.

The 2010 W0AK Field Day went really well. I ended up at the site at about 10 a.m. Saturday morning to help set up. Station set-up was well underway by the time I had arrived, and the antenna raising was about to commence. It was a hot and sticky day — about 90 degrees with a heat index just shy of 100.

PowerFilm Solar set up their 1 kW military-grade Solar Shade the night before, and a storm had blown through the area at about 5:30 a.m. Saturday, and boy I really underestimated the strength of that structure. It stood up to about 60 mph winds without even batting an eye.

The Solar Shade powered pretty much everything except the logging computers without a hiccup. The solar power was stored in two 120 Ah Humvee batteries, which were more than enough for our needs. Having such a unique, huge structure there for solar power gave us great talking points with visitors to our Field Day site.

We had two dignitaries visit us on Saturday from served agencies (which scored us extra points!): Joyce Flinn, the Readiness and Response Bureau Chief for the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division; and Lt. Col. Kevin Plagman of the Iowa National Guard. Both took a tour of the Field Day site and learned the purpose and goals of the Field Day event, and then visited with operators.

Unfortunately, as in years past, Field Day was competing with other major events in the Des Moines metro area — this year it was the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships at Drake and the Des Moines Arts Festival downtown, so it’s difficult for amateur radio to compete with these events for news coverage. I did a phone interview with WHO Newsradio 1040 Friday morning but I didn’t get a chance to listen to see if we made the cut.

After dinner, I sat down at our 15m sideband station and called CQ for about an hour and a half, making just over 100 contacts, mostly with stations on the east coast that were booming into Iowa.

At about 2:30 a.m. a storm began to approach our location. There was plenty of lightning to our north and northwest, rendering the bands more useless as they came closer. Eventually the gust front blew through, we gave up with the static, disconnected and powered off, and covered the stations with plastic sheeting before retreating to our cars where most of us took naps until the storm left the area at 5 a.m. Luckily everything stayed dry, but the lightning now to our south was still making the bands too noisy to do any meaningful operating. The air cooled down by a brisk 20 degrees by 5 a.m. — a welcome change from the 90-degree temperatures we had been experiencing late in the week.

With the breakfast crew’s arrival soon after the storm, I decided it was time for me to throw in the towel for the night and go home to get some sleep.

I had made the goal for our Field Day to reach 1,000 contacts this year after making 915 last year. Even with the thunderstorms disrupting the event for a good 4 hours, we accomplished this goal and made 1036 contacts. The only mode that we suffered a decrease of contacts in was PSK31 — last year we made 1 PSK contact, and this year we made none — a sharp decline from last year! Okay, maybe it’s just one contact… but still…

Field Day is the last major event for my club until the chili feed and auction around Thanksgiving time — but planning has already started for next year’s Field Day. In the past year, there’s been a push to move out of our comfort zone at Big Creek State Park, where we’ve held the event for years, to a new, more urban location. We looked at moving the event this year but it didn’t pan out. We are compiling a list of possible locations for next year, and will be narrowed down in the coming months before further planning.