Field Day 2024

Saturday, June 22 and Sunday, June 23

Location: Naga-waukee County Park

Picnic area #4

 

Field Day Summary by Carter Davis, W9ERR, on-site leader

Started off with some rain, then more rain. Rinse and repeat.

We got the 80m  EFHW up and set up a station by 11am

Then we put up the 40m EFHW and had that up at 12pm.

Setup a dipole which Jeff AD9AB brought along. Had that setup by 1pm.

Don W9ATU got onto 40m at the start. Had Nick K9NCH logging. Those two went at it calling CQ for 2-3 hours and made a lot of contacts on 40m  Mostly close in, IL, WI, MI, OH, MN  but did log a lot of contacts.

Jeff AD9AB jumped on 15m and was working some contacts there as well. We did have some CW contacts with the CW skill of Jim KS9Q.

Jeff KD9VGH had some station issues and found that the dipole he was setup on was not working for him. We took down the antenna and put up a folded dipole that he had brought along. Once we got that up, he was able to start making some contacts with that on 20m.

We also had the GOTA station up and running with a few contacts there.

We were up and running till about 7:30 pm when the severe storms started rolling in. We shut down for the night about 8:00 pm due to the weather.

Sunday morning, we got going again about 7:30 am.

I set up FT8 on the 40m station, and we played with the day, at least until my radio went South. About 10:30 am, we were switching over the antenna from the EFHW to my Magloop antenna. SWR was checked, but after we made the change, we were not getting any contacts. It was noticed then that there was no output power being seen on the meter. We went through and checked everything we could think of, but no output power was being seen. So we shut down that station for the day.  (Still not operational at the home QTH.)

The other stations we operated ‘til the end of field day.  We closed down at 1:00 pm. And of course, that was when we finally began to see some sunshine.

We only used the generator for a short time, probably less than an hour this year, as we had battery boxes up and running the stations. Those worked well, and I did set up a solar panel for a bit on Saturday, but with all the clouds, I was only getting about 20-30 watts of recharge, so we packed it up as more rain came in. That was on the station while contracts were being made by W9ATU, so that should count for solar power.

Bonus Points…