Well the ARRL Field Day 2017 has come and gone. Anyone here participate?
I helped out the High Point ARC, which having been appointed publicity chair this year made it a responsibility to do so. Leading up to the event, I contacted a number of public and other news agencies and a few of them actually responded and showed up, which should help us get some bonus points on the contest that isn't a contest. In any case, here are some of my takeaways from what, is at least in part, an exercise in communications preparedness that is designed to get people out operating outside of their comfort zone.
1) As I said above, part of the reason it is "field day" is that it tries to get people to operate their radios in locations, environments, and conditions which they are not accustomed. For myself this meant taking my Yaesu FT991A, tuner, and power supply and setting up on a table inside of a tent in the woods. As a shout out to @htperry I received complements on my setup and people said they would like one just like it, including the power supply. (I am running an FT991A with an Astron linear 30A supply and a LDG ProAT2 tuner connected via USB cable to a netbook PC running Linux).
2) This presented some unique challenges, especially as we had a fairly intense thunderstorm pass through Saturday afternoon. The challenges included the fact that the club, operating four stations total, was sharing one 115Vac circuit and because of the heat and humidity running fans was part of that load (thankfully in the evening someone gave me one to use), and lighting after dark became particularly important. I had a garage light hanging in my tent and any time I or anyone else would key the transmitter the light would start dimming and flashing. Clearly emergency power is a critical component of emergency comms.
3) I operated a GOTA station, which uses a different call sign than the official club - in my case I used my call sign. I ran a 10M dipole antenna that would also tune to 12 and 15, at least on digital (PSK31) but wouldn't hold for SSB on the non design bands.
4) 10M seems to share a lot of properties with 6M in that it is fickle. At the onset the band was deader than a doorknob but then I noticed some traffic on 15, especially digital and by evening time 10 meters had quite a bit of traffic and it persisted through Sunday morning.
5) I can confirm what I have been told is true that if you put a girl on the radio it will create a pile up. I found it pretty easy to work through the pileup and could often times make the contact within about 2 or three tries. I am not sure if it is because my radio has good audio quality (as I've been told it does), or that my call sign is phonetically easy and contains an actual word even though it is a 2x3.
6) The 10 meter band is generally quieter than the lower frequency bands such as 80 and 40 meter, which allowed me to run both RF pre-amplifiers and keep the gain up. Noise reduction was not required. This enabled me to pick up weaker signals, which is still effective, especially on a digital mode like PSK31. One thing I noticed about it is that it seems to be regional and this varies over the course of the day. I would get a lot of CT, NH, VT, NY, and ME for a while and then it would switch to OH, MI, WI, and IA, and then possibly out to CO, OK and TX and even CA a little later and then maybe back to the north east again.
7) During the peak hours, especially around the female induced collisions, there would be A LOT of overlapping conversation which makes it hard to pick out the station your trying to reach. This provided a good opportunity to experiment with the digital filtering that my radio is capable of (it runs a Texas Instruments C6000 processor, which is designed for these functions). I found that by narrowing the
filter width and employing a notch filter I could often times sufficiently suppress the offending station to make the contact.
8) Internet access is something that people frequently take for granted. I had my iPad with me and I was able to use it as a mobile access point to tether the little Acer netbook that I was running for FLDigi and logging applications. I found that logging software for this event was an issue and ended up downloading compiling and installing software (I run Arch Linux) on the fly under less than ideal circumstances while your trying to do other things is a challenge, but could be a necessary part of the emergency process.
9) Most of the traffic was concentrated at the lower ends of the bands. My radio has a real time waterfall and spectrum display that makes it fairly easy to tune into the signals of people calling CQ, as compared to the other operators who would have to slowly dial across the bands.
10) The club attempted to make satellite contact. They were doing so with a satellite antenna (Yaggi beam with elements in both axis). They were trying to use a Baofeng UV-5R which didn't seem to be up to snuff for the tast as they just got a quick blip only, and upon realizing this I offered them the use of my Kenwood HT. I have a Baofeng that I got for my wife, KN4BUJ, and I noticed there is a BIG difference in the performance. Unfortunately there weren't any more satellite passes during the time I was there that evening.
11) Speaking of my wife, she is still very radio shy. I managed to get her to log for AJ4TF for a little while but that was about it. When the thunderstorm was about to hit, I called her on the radio which I had tuned to the club repeater and surprisingly she answered - which was a real first and I made arrangements to pick her up to bring her out for the club cookout.
12) I mentioned above, I put the information out to a number of local agencies. We recieved a visit from the city communications director and the local Fox TV station showed up and interviewed KM4UHV (the locally infamous Ultra High Voltage) and her dad AE4TI) and we made the six o'clock news on Saturday. There was a quick shot of me running a radio, which is more than enough TV exposure for me, thank you.
13) I learned that contesting is really not my cup of tea. It was fun experiencing a new challenge of dealing with pile ups and congested bands, but I don't really see the attraction in making large numbers of short contacts. Some better training in the requirements for logging and what not would have been beneficial as I was told you only need the call sign, class, and location, but you also need the band and mode you're operating on which I dind't record. The Windows only program Squirl for FD logging handles this for you - which is why I installed Wine on the fly.
14) I did make some interesting contacts. I managed to contact W1AW (The ARRL in CT), a maritime station, SSB contact with a QRP station, and interestingly a PSK propagation "bot" from propnet that broadcasts every 10 minutes and asks that you respond to it 200hz off freq. At first, I didn't recognize the information it was broadcasting as it was obviously some sort of code information about the station. I asked AJ4TF about it and he said it was just garbled, but I saw that station repeat the information and another one put out a similar message. Finally, I realized it was asking you to contact it and how to do so and when I did, I received a lengthy PSK31 reply from it but missed most of it because I was 200hz off. Later in the day I saw I received an email from propnet asking me if I would be interested in joining as they saw my transmission to them.
15) Last but not least, if it is a year before I next hear the words "CQ FIeld Day" it will be soon enough.
I helped out the High Point ARC, which having been appointed publicity chair this year made it a responsibility to do so. Leading up to the event, I contacted a number of public and other news agencies and a few of them actually responded and showed up, which should help us get some bonus points on the contest that isn't a contest. In any case, here are some of my takeaways from what, is at least in part, an exercise in communications preparedness that is designed to get people out operating outside of their comfort zone.
1) As I said above, part of the reason it is "field day" is that it tries to get people to operate their radios in locations, environments, and conditions which they are not accustomed. For myself this meant taking my Yaesu FT991A, tuner, and power supply and setting up on a table inside of a tent in the woods. As a shout out to @htperry I received complements on my setup and people said they would like one just like it, including the power supply. (I am running an FT991A with an Astron linear 30A supply and a LDG ProAT2 tuner connected via USB cable to a netbook PC running Linux).
2) This presented some unique challenges, especially as we had a fairly intense thunderstorm pass through Saturday afternoon. The challenges included the fact that the club, operating four stations total, was sharing one 115Vac circuit and because of the heat and humidity running fans was part of that load (thankfully in the evening someone gave me one to use), and lighting after dark became particularly important. I had a garage light hanging in my tent and any time I or anyone else would key the transmitter the light would start dimming and flashing. Clearly emergency power is a critical component of emergency comms.
3) I operated a GOTA station, which uses a different call sign than the official club - in my case I used my call sign. I ran a 10M dipole antenna that would also tune to 12 and 15, at least on digital (PSK31) but wouldn't hold for SSB on the non design bands.
4) 10M seems to share a lot of properties with 6M in that it is fickle. At the onset the band was deader than a doorknob but then I noticed some traffic on 15, especially digital and by evening time 10 meters had quite a bit of traffic and it persisted through Sunday morning.
5) I can confirm what I have been told is true that if you put a girl on the radio it will create a pile up. I found it pretty easy to work through the pileup and could often times make the contact within about 2 or three tries. I am not sure if it is because my radio has good audio quality (as I've been told it does), or that my call sign is phonetically easy and contains an actual word even though it is a 2x3.
6) The 10 meter band is generally quieter than the lower frequency bands such as 80 and 40 meter, which allowed me to run both RF pre-amplifiers and keep the gain up. Noise reduction was not required. This enabled me to pick up weaker signals, which is still effective, especially on a digital mode like PSK31. One thing I noticed about it is that it seems to be regional and this varies over the course of the day. I would get a lot of CT, NH, VT, NY, and ME for a while and then it would switch to OH, MI, WI, and IA, and then possibly out to CO, OK and TX and even CA a little later and then maybe back to the north east again.
7) During the peak hours, especially around the female induced collisions, there would be A LOT of overlapping conversation which makes it hard to pick out the station your trying to reach. This provided a good opportunity to experiment with the digital filtering that my radio is capable of (it runs a Texas Instruments C6000 processor, which is designed for these functions). I found that by narrowing the
filter width and employing a notch filter I could often times sufficiently suppress the offending station to make the contact.
8) Internet access is something that people frequently take for granted. I had my iPad with me and I was able to use it as a mobile access point to tether the little Acer netbook that I was running for FLDigi and logging applications. I found that logging software for this event was an issue and ended up downloading compiling and installing software (I run Arch Linux) on the fly under less than ideal circumstances while your trying to do other things is a challenge, but could be a necessary part of the emergency process.
9) Most of the traffic was concentrated at the lower ends of the bands. My radio has a real time waterfall and spectrum display that makes it fairly easy to tune into the signals of people calling CQ, as compared to the other operators who would have to slowly dial across the bands.
10) The club attempted to make satellite contact. They were doing so with a satellite antenna (Yaggi beam with elements in both axis). They were trying to use a Baofeng UV-5R which didn't seem to be up to snuff for the tast as they just got a quick blip only, and upon realizing this I offered them the use of my Kenwood HT. I have a Baofeng that I got for my wife, KN4BUJ, and I noticed there is a BIG difference in the performance. Unfortunately there weren't any more satellite passes during the time I was there that evening.
11) Speaking of my wife, she is still very radio shy. I managed to get her to log for AJ4TF for a little while but that was about it. When the thunderstorm was about to hit, I called her on the radio which I had tuned to the club repeater and surprisingly she answered - which was a real first and I made arrangements to pick her up to bring her out for the club cookout.
12) I mentioned above, I put the information out to a number of local agencies. We recieved a visit from the city communications director and the local Fox TV station showed up and interviewed KM4UHV (the locally infamous Ultra High Voltage) and her dad AE4TI) and we made the six o'clock news on Saturday. There was a quick shot of me running a radio, which is more than enough TV exposure for me, thank you.
13) I learned that contesting is really not my cup of tea. It was fun experiencing a new challenge of dealing with pile ups and congested bands, but I don't really see the attraction in making large numbers of short contacts. Some better training in the requirements for logging and what not would have been beneficial as I was told you only need the call sign, class, and location, but you also need the band and mode you're operating on which I dind't record. The Windows only program Squirl for FD logging handles this for you - which is why I installed Wine on the fly.
14) I did make some interesting contacts. I managed to contact W1AW (The ARRL in CT), a maritime station, SSB contact with a QRP station, and interestingly a PSK propagation "bot" from propnet that broadcasts every 10 minutes and asks that you respond to it 200hz off freq. At first, I didn't recognize the information it was broadcasting as it was obviously some sort of code information about the station. I asked AJ4TF about it and he said it was just garbled, but I saw that station repeat the information and another one put out a similar message. Finally, I realized it was asking you to contact it and how to do so and when I did, I received a lengthy PSK31 reply from it but missed most of it because I was 200hz off. Later in the day I saw I received an email from propnet asking me if I would be interested in joining as they saw my transmission to them.
15) Last but not least, if it is a year before I next hear the words "CQ FIeld Day" it will be soon enough.
