Field Day 2010

I thought I would miss Field Day this year due to operational training, but I managed to still participate. With the help of the ARRL Field Day Locator, I found a club near me , K5FC, in Dallas, TX. They were setup in a large park on a hill, with many antennas. I was given a friendly tour, and then I helped them erect a 80m Half Wave Vertical Antenna. This thing was huge, with several 60 foot long ground radials. I am not sure why, but they put a toilet float on top of this monster. They joked that if it flooded, the antenna wouldn't sink. At the base was two tuning coils mounted onto a large disk with bolts around the outside for ground radials. They used heavy duty fishing line for guide wires mounted half way up this antenna and spaced by 90 degrees.

After chatting with a few hams, I started looking through the club logs, to see if WA6YBN showed up anywhere. No luck there, so I started helping to log on a 20m station. While running shotgun, we contacted W6TD, which I recognized as the Southern Inyo Amateur Radio Association listing themselves in Orange County. I really liked the simple software they were using for logging. They were using Squirl Field Day Logger 8. All I had to do was enter the callsign, and it would check for a duplicate. Then I would enter the Class, and Section. The Section drop down, actually shows the whole name of the area. Once entered, it shows a map with number of contacts, based on Sections. By the time I left, that station already had about 30 contacts from California.

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KI6PSP (Ed)