W5RRR had another great Winter Field Day outing this year.
In spite of lousy weather (wind and rain), N5LOW, KG5URA, K5KUA (guest), AB5SS, KG5U, KB5PGY, and KA5TBB came to participate. Special acknowledgement to David KG5URA, who setup outside with his buddipole portable antenna and IC7300, while the rest of the operations were conducted in the protected indoors of the shack.
This event reflected a strong participation with CW – -./- – -/- — /-.. .- – -/- – -/-… !!
Soapbox
N5LOW (Sat) I did not get much work done (Sat). Lots of rag chew. Maca worked on getting Joe on the air for hours. He finally did it. I made 4 contacts, missed a few. I was on 10 meters. Lots of dx there, two of my 4 were from Europe. We had fun. John had a cool little QRP rig, it had great ears.
(Sun) I spent this morning working, working and managed to get 21 contacts, I went to the old pen and paper version and that helped some, I asked and asked for repeats till I got the call down, Even with that painful process I was able to get myself going. I found that format is everything! if you are expecting certain data , and hear it , it’s much nicer. For example, I do well when I recognize DE Oh the call sign is coming next. Knowing that there were only 4 types Home Outside Inside Mobil helped me gather that data. I did really bad on the rest. (qrz to the rescue) Dale left me with a clue yesterday .. your last item , send your call, assume someone is waiting. Like most things in life, a hard time is a learning experience. I used my mystery dipole today, I think they work great, nobody asked me for a repeat. that might be because send everything twice. but yea antenna rocks on 20M. … on a side note macloggerdx rocks..
KG5URA Loads of lessons learned in here. I lost almost an hour setting up the buddipole due to gusty winds so stuck with SSB on 15 which was on fire. I needed to make sure that the antenna was well secured. I’m still interested in working QSO’s with JT8call.
AB5SS … After Terry (N5LOW & KA5TBB), David (KG5URA), and Dale (KG5U) left the shack, I stayed until ~10:45pm working mainly CW on 15/20/40/80m but also getting some SSB Q’s on 40 & 80m. 80m was amazingly quiet and was able to work to the west coast & up to Rhode Island. 40m had a higher noise level for some reason but still decent. 40 & 80m antennas were working well. Went back this morning and found David, KB5PGY, already there and making PSK31 Q’s on 20/15/10m (good multipliers, thanks David!) KG5URA & KB5PGY please send me your logs (ADIF format) and I’ll import into the master log file. Current stats without these imports are 111 CW, 97 SSB, 36 Digital QSO’s with 14 multipliers… Fun event!
K5RG Based on the reports, you’se guys did good!! Would have liked to join you but ended in the attic this weekend removing + installing new bathroom fan. House projects and amateur radio seem to be incompatible.
W9TWJ Sounds like you all had a great event! Certainly wish I could have joined you but Jasmine had to work so I had the little ones plus I caught some flu bug so spent most of the weekend laying around drinking fluids and monitoring the clusters. Not exactly my ideal weekend but it could have been worse.
W5OC Congrats to the W5RRR effort- a good showing! For me I went to Stephen F Austin Park to improve my skills and to see if I could string some good wire antennas in the high trees… The highlight was working W5RRR/AB5SS on 15m CW!
N5LOW’s straight key was almost as big as my KX3 🙂