June 23, 2019

2019 ARRL Field Day and my 100th blog post

This weekend was ARRL Field Day. This is also my 100th blog post, Yay! I was on the committee for Field Day this year. We had conference calls and did a dry run to make sure we had all the connectors and accessories we needed. Quite a bit of planning is required to make this event go smoothly. It was again a joint effort between the St Pete Amateur Radio Club, the Clearwater Amateur Radio Society and the Upper Pinellas Amateur Radio Club. The 3 clubs get along well so it’s a good fit. We use the Clearwater Fire Training Center to setup at as we have the last 2 years. I’m told they are tearing down the smaller training tower and building a new mgmt building and we’ll probably be using that for the next field day.

Around 60 people showed up and we got quite a few of the bonus points. I taught a class on Antenna Analyzers for the educational requirement. We had visits from elected officials, emergency mgmt dept officials and the fire chief. Field day is an emergency preparedness drill and public relations event for ham radio, along with a radiosport contest.

Saturday was a bit slow on the radio side but I came back on Sunday morning and thing picked up quite a bit and it was a lot of fun. We ended up breaking 1000 QSO’s for the weekend.

Setting up the 20-15-10m beam on the 80ft fire training tower
Pulling out the sloper antenna
My presentation on antenna analyzers
Showing the schematic of the homebrew analyzer I built
Amanda W4MMY made mac and cheese for the potluck
Brian Fields W9CR from HamWAN came and helped get UPARC’s HamWAN working and tested.
Hourly graph of the QSO’s. You can see there’s a lot of activity on the right
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