The New Bern Amateur Radio Club hosted another successful and fun Field Day this past June. This year, we operated from Glenburnie Park with a relatively mild day weather wise. Set-up began around 8:30 on Saturday morning. We endedup with a few stations set up and all running on emergency power. All stations operated this year on the club call, W4EWN.
Our Stations:
- Dave, KC3HHA: Yaesu FT-8987D, antenna was a 84 ft end fed long wire, Inergy 1500 Flex 180 Ah solar generator for voice on 20 and 40M
- Ken, WB2AII: 40 and 20M fan dipole
- Logan, NC4OM: Icom IC-703, 40M dipole constructed from scratch on-site
- John, KO4OFO: Icom IC-706, 20M dipole, Linux/fldigi digital station
As last year, I set up our PSK31 digital station and spent much of the day answering questions about digital operation and otherwise socializing rather than operating. It was something else to see the PSK31 portion of the waterfall absolutely full of signals. I made contact with or saw several stations I recognized from last year's Field Day and general PSK31 operations. The Amateur community really is that: a community.
Other stations operated SSB Phone and at least one got some exercise on CW. I tried to get ops to run CW on my rig, but had no takers. I would have tried myself, but my CW skills are not up to the task of "contesting" speeds. Club President Danny, WD4CQ, once again filled a couple of log pages making voice contacts.
The highlight of the day for me personally was being part of Logan's, NC4OM, first Field Day as a fairly newly minted Amateur. Logan got on the air and made quite a few low power contacts with an antenna constructed on-site from spare bits scrounged from several tool and spare parts bags and a borrowed field power supply:
To me, that's what Field Day is all about: improvising solutions and getting new Amateurs on the air. Logan has agreed to share his thoughts about his first Field Day at our August NBARC meeting at Moore's. Hearing his presentation will be a great way to learn how Field Day impacts newer operators.