Monday, June 30, 2008

Field Day 2008

I was not part of any organized Field Day activity (although I did visit the MARG field Day setup on Saturday...very nice!) this year and I had very limited time, so I decided to combine a short hike with ham radio. I headed out Sunday morning to one of my favorite hiking spots and setup near a small unnamed lake. Alana and the kids dropped me off at 9:30am with the promise to be back at the trail head for a 12:30 pickup.

Along with a snack, water and bug spray I brought in the following radio gear:

- Yaseu Ft-817
- MFJ 1899-T Multi-band whip antenna
- 7.5ah 12v gel cell
- Kenwood TH-D7A + Garmin eTrex Vista GPS for APRS

Here is the general location (West of Ottawa, Ontario), showing my VA3TRZ-7 APRS beacon courtesy of findu.com and Google:


As it rained HARD the night before thus the trail into my operating location was very muddy and wet, perfect conditions for mosquitoes. Here is a snapshot of the trail. What a jungle!



I setup at about 10:00am and settled in for about 1 hour or so of operation. The bugs were a bit nasty until a breeze picked up. Here is a picture of my operating site which is on a ledge overlooking this small lake.



For an antenna mount I used my Lee-Valley hiking stick. I stuck it in the ground about 5" and attached a simple antenna mount on it via the camera tripod adapter on top of the grip. The MFJ antenna connected via BNC as did my coax. I strung out a single counter-poise wire and I was good to go!



I was setup as "1B ON Battery" and started checking out the bands. I was amazed to hear lots of activity on all the bands 6m to 40m! I tried calling CQ on 20m, but with my low power I had little luck. At about 11am 10 m was coming in strong and I worked 5 stations in the US. At 11:15 I worked 2 stations on 40m. I also worked Dale, VE3XZT, on APRS ;-) I was having SWR problems on 6m, so I could not work the many station I heard on 6m. Considering that I was running only about 2.5w in to a compromise antenna, I was very pleased with my results.

I packed it in at about 11:30am and hiked back out to the trail head for my pickup.

I saw no-one else on the trail, but I did have a family of what I think were Golden Eagles keeping me company while at the lake and on my walk back.



I think I will try this location again, but perhaps in the spring or fall when there are less bugs ;-)

Tom
VA3NFA

1 Comments:

Blogger Jeff Milne said...

Tom,

Looks like you had a blast. Good to see you are having some time for ham radio. Nice Blog.

11:42 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home