Our first Winter Field Day was a success!

We made 251 Qs, operating for 16 hrs of the 24 hour contest on 20/40/80 SSB.  The Wegwaas cabin at Brighton Rec Area was a great location with plenty of room for two antennas on the ladderball posts that were off to the side.

The propane heat in the cabin eventually got us up to sweltering temps, and had a nice table for operating from.  Icom 7300 at 100W, LDG Z11Pro 2, Heil HM-12, everything on battery power, and we even brought the foot pedal & boom mic setup!  Big thanks to W8TAM for putting together this portable++ setup!  The 80m inverted V doublet performed very well, as expected.  It is our favorite antenna for portable ops.

W8TAM making Winter Field Day contacts as W8RP.

The Spiderbeams both stayed up throughout the contest and came down easily.  That is not always the case with this piece of kit!  We used the new-to-us technique of taping each joint with 3M Super 88.  Very impressed with this performance of this tape – expensive but worth it for this application.  I am very proud that W8TAM and I were able to install these antennas in the dark in below freezing conditions safely and quickly.   #beastmode

  • Claimed score: 4255
  • Our multipliers:
    • 3x for SSB Qs on 3 bands
    • 2x for 100w or less
  • Bonuses:
    • 1500 pts not at home
    • 1500 pts no commercial power

From the WFD Rules:
QSO Points: 1 point per Phone QSO, 2 points per CW & Digital QSO… Busted exchanges will be penalized by 1 additional point for each missed exchange or call sign. Duplicate contacts (same call, band, and mode) will not be counted, but will not be penalized.

Mode and Band Multipliers: Count 1 multiplier for each mode operated per band. For example, operating CW and Phone on 80, 40, 15 and 10 meters, CW and PSK31 on 20m, FM on 2meters and 440 would be a total multiplier of 12x.

So you can see that we definitely left some points on the table.  Next year we will be soliciting CW ops and we’d also like to nab the 1500 bonus for a satellite Q.

Thanks to Dinesh AB3DC, Gayathri N8GRU and Dave N8SBE for coming by to make some see our setup and contacts.  Mitch, K8UCH we are so sorry we missed you!    Also thanks to John WA8TON for arranging for the space.  It was great!

I had a caller that knew Roy Purchase, and he said how nice it was to make contact with W8RP.  I told him our club was honored to hold the call – always a thrill to call whiskey eight romeo papa.

Take nothing but Qs leave nothing but footprints!

73 Julie K8VOX