Tag: wfd

Winter Field Day 2024

This Winter Field Day (WFD) I operated with the West Georgia Amateur Radio Society. I am one of two CW ops so I got to play CW. We operated under W4F. I typically operate away from the main group so I won’t QRM them. This gives me the latitude to switch bands at will. My purpose is to get multipilers. You get a multpier from working each band. I managed 5 bands. Six meters never came up and I had no takers on 160 meters. Friday night and Saturday morning, prior to WFD, I made a few POTA contacts, had two CW QSO’s and managed to get France on 10 meters. So the antenna was working. 

About the club, in general, we are not hard core contesters. We like to do these events for three reasons, we like to socialize, eat, and play on the radio, often in that order. Saturday, John WD8LQT made chili. Along with the chili, we had hotdogs, coleslaw, and various condimets and snacks. My wife Mary K4SEZ, made Graham Cracker Cookies, a club favorite.

I went QRV at 1400 hrs. eastern on saturday. CW during WFD can be a challenge. There are some really good ops that can zip along at 25-30 wpm. I am not one of them. I can usually get the exchnge if I listen to them call a few times. I can send between 16-22 wpm. Sometimes I felt like I was standing still at 22 wpm with these ops at high speed. A lot of times CW ops are operating portable and QRP or low power. I made many contacts with the S-meter not budging off of zero. We also had a lot of QSB and some QRN. You could see the QSB come and go on the waterfall. It was a bit of a challenge, but I felt WFD helped me realize how my CW Innovations class has already helped me. I was able to copy the QRQ stations better than I have in the past. I eneded up making 45+ contacts mainly by search and pounce. I didn’t think I would do well running a frequency — yet. I went QRT about 2200 hrs. eastern Saturday night. I had to leave early Sunday morning so my wife could get to church on time.

Equipment: My antenna was my Chameleon EmComm II ver.1. I ran a 60′ wire in an inverted L withe a 20′ vertical section using my push-up pole and tying off the other end to a pine tree. I had a 50′ counterpoise underneath the antenna. The antenna played well. I have no complaints, it did what it was supposed to do. I think it will be my WFD/FD antenna if I have the space to set it up. The radio was 2nd Peter, my IC-7300. I was running between 35-50 watts. The radio purred along and never missed a beat. I love my 7300’s. I always say that if I could only have one radio, the IC-7300 would be it. For paddles, I used my Begali Expedition. It’s a nice heavy paddle that doesn’t move and is silky smooth. Logging was handled by ACLog WFD edition on my Lenovo Thinkpad.

Everything worked as advertised, so no real changes need to be made to the radios and related gear. We did talk about getting a MESH network between me and the base camp so we can network my computer with theirs. All in all, it was a good time. I got to see folks I don’t see very often, ate good food and ran some CW on the radio. The QSO map is my contacts only. The club is still operating as I write this. 73 – de Scott

Winter Field Day

This year the West Georgia Amateur Radio Society (WGARS) decided to hold winter field day at Little Tallapoosa Park in Carroll County, GA. I would call the event semi-serious. I don’t think any of us are real hard-core contesters, but some of us watch the numbers. The majority of our members operate using SSB and I was the only one operating CW. The plan was for me to get as many bands as I could for multipliers. That meant I had to be able to swap bands fairly quickly in order to advantage of changing band conditions. We had five stations set up, 4 of which had bandpass filters. Because I didn’t have any bandpass filters I was located about 100 yards away from the main group.

Gear. I brought the FTDX10 with me to see how it would do in a semi-contest environment. It fed a Mat Tuner, Mat-30 tuner, and then to my 29-foot random wire antenna. This has become my favorite antenna. I logged with N3FJP WFD software and used a K1EL keyer. The computer and radio were powered by a Honda EU-2200 generator (we ran alternate power). This generator is very quiet and is very fuel efficient. The rest of my camper was fed with shore power at the campsite. I kept warm with a little ceramic heater.

Operation. This year I tried something new. Not only did I use the N3FJP software for logging but I also used it to send CW, in other words, I did everything from the keyboard. I was a little apprehensive, aren’t we all when it comes to something new? But I found it worked quite well. Band conditions, on the other hand, were not that good. They were up and down with a lot of fade. By being able to jump around I was able to work 100 contacts on 5 different bands. I was hoping for more, but there weren’t a whole lot of stations out there to work. I thought it might have been my station, but looking at the QSO Map, I was getting out okay.

Cold weather may have kept some CW ops at home. It gets harder to work a key or paddle when your hands are cold.

FTDX10. Part of my ongoing review of this radio. You really can’t get a feel for a radio or any piece of kit unless you use it over a period of time. My other radios are feeling the pain of neglect. How did it do? Not bad really. I made an effort to try the CW decoder. There were times were I really needed it due to QSB (fading). Sometimes the band would drop as I was getting the exchange. The decoder often picked up what I missed. It is not a replacement for your ears and mind. But it did help and made me a little more efficient. My hearing is not that good. The decoder is sensitive to CW speed. It does best when it is close to the sender’s speed. I set the outer dial (MVLP) to CW speed for this purpose. While I normally set the function knob to RF power, because band conditions were so variable, I set it to level (waterfall level) which allowed me to adjust the waterfall as needed. The radio performed well and I appreciate the roofing filters. I had one issue and that was I would tune across the band and about every 10 KC the waterfall would go dark and I would have to retune the antenna system. That became rather annoying. There is an example of what was going on in the activation video below. Very quickly, I got a response from one of my subscribers stating that it was the tuner and not the radio. This morning, I broke out the radio and tested it with the Mat-30 to make sure I still had the problem here at home (I did). I then swapped the Mat-30 for my old LDG Z-11 Pro and viola! The problem disappeared. You can see the results in the second video.

I think my club as a whole had a good time. It is fun to get and socialize, plus throw in a little operating. When testing a radio, or any piece of kit, You can’t really do it justice over a couple of days. I’ve had the radio for a couple of months, and as I work through the issues, I find that sometimes we don’t know each other that well yet. It’s still early in the dance. I will say that I am warming up to the radio more than I thought but I still say that if I had to choose between it and the 7300, the 7300 would still be my choice. However, that gap is getting narrower. If Yaesu would make a few software upgrades…