Field Day Lessons Learned and Future Requirements

Our Field Day in Virginia was pretty decent this year. We had plenty of visitors responding to our newspaper notice. Several folks took a turn at the Get On The Air (GOTA) station.

However, we always forget some obvious items every year.

The lessons learned from sunshine related issues are obvious. We forgot ways to shade them again this year because we got so busy with other preparation details.

Here are a few lessons learned from our Field Day written in the form of system requirements.

  1. The network routers shall be set to one fixed speed rather than auto-negotiate the speed to keep the network connections more seamless.
  2. The network routers should have their speed set to the minimum speed of 1 Mbps to provide the best sensitivity (this is plenty fast enough for the meager network needs with the N3FJP software).
  3. The network routers should have their RF output power set to below the maximum (250 mW for the Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT) if the Field Day site is hot
  4. All network nodes shall use static IP addresses.
  5. Network nodes shall not use DHCP addresses.
  6. The Network shall not use domain or host names.
  7. The radios shall be protected from direct sunshine at all times.
  8. The computers shall be protected from direct sunshine at all times.

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Digital GOTA attracts the Youth

If you are like many ARRL Field Day operations you have a Get On The Air (GOTA) station for guests.

We have done this every year I have been involved with my club’s Field Day and have had mostly good results. We usually have one Boy Scout troop stop by and make a few QSOs each. Also some technicians in our club like to operate the station during the late hours to get a chance to do SSB HF (yes we always have a control operator with valid privileges). Also it seems every year a new ham really enjoys the simplicity of the GOTA station without the concern over band sharing the other stations deal with.

Every year our GOTA is set up pretty much the same…

  • Icom 746
  • HF Antenna – Wire Dipole
  • Microphone
  • Key
  • Computer for logging
  • and that’s about it

Last year I posted observations about what the youth seem to enjoy most about our Field Day 2008…

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Alternate Power Bonus for Field Day

Bonus points are important for the annual ARRL Field Day event in June.

If you are thinking of participating in your local club’s Field Day festivities or are heading to the campground with your family for a Bravo station, bonus points are available.

One of my favorites is the Alternate Power Field Day bonus.

To quote the ARRL Field Day rules for 2009…

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Battery Energy Density: Gel Cell

Working at an airplane company as an EE certainly puts energy density of electrical storage components at the top of the list of important things.

Of course the buzz word of the decade when talking about batteries is Lithium, Lithium, Lithium.

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Confirming Radio Mobile in the AT Golden Packet Attempt

I have experimented with Radio Mobile for a few years. If you have not tried using it, you should. It is a free RF link analysis program that uses geographic elevation data to help you determine the obstacles between two radio stations.

The details of this program’s capabilities are too numerous to mention here so please visit the web site here…

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Digital Modes Need Calibrated Soundcards

I made my very first Olivia QSO tonight. It was a bit daunting, but I took the time to study a little about the standard, already had MixW rigged up with the Olivia DLL, listened around a bit on 20 meters then 40, figured out where to call CQ and just did it.

It was not even two minutes before a ham came back to my Olivia 16/500 call on one of the 40 meter calling frequencies.

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An HF Amplifier for your QRP Rig

During our Sunday night Tech Net in Northern Virginia one of the participants described a 140 watt amplifier he just finished building for use on the HF bands.

My immediate thought was “Hmmm, he already has a 100 watt style typical HF radio. Why does he need something that does 140 watts?”

The I remembered he also has a QRP rig which generates the typical 5 watts or so and this linear amplifier allows this QRP rig to be just like the typical 100 watt radios when you need or want it.

The amplifier concept comes from a company called…

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Solar Energy PV Payback Period

Solar energy from photo-voltaic (PV) panels is a great thing to show off at the ARRL Field Day, but economic realities and lengthy ROI periods continue to make it financially unsound for home use.

The Navigator from US Interface – a First Look

Many times I have built home-brew radio to computer sound card audio interfaces with success. The goals were to have some fun with the many digital modes out there including PSK31, MFSK, Olivia and RTTY with an emphasis on PSK31.

Also available for use are handy CW decoders like CWGet and CWSkimmer.

To complete the computer to radio marriage I purchased and built a WinKey and Winkey USB kit from K1EL.

By this time, the number of cables between the computer and the radio was getting a little out of hand. I sought a new approach that connected to the computer with just one cable.

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Splitting One Serial Port to Multiple Applications

Recently I got up to speed with MixW for some PSK31 work. It works great.

I also tried out CWSkimmer with similar results.

I noticed there was an advantage of allowing each application access to read and control the radio so the frequency information correlates.

No problem I thought. However, I began thinking about the upcoming Virginia QSO Party where I will also be using a logging program from N3FJP or N1MM.

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