Field Day 2019
(Revised 11/8/2019)
Location: Washington Monument State Park (Boonsboro, Maryland)
Date:
June 22-23, 2019
Facebook:
Randallstown ARC
HamCommunity:
Randallstown/NIH ARC
Short Video by Logan
The crew: 2019 attendees left to right: (rear) K3MZ, WA3PYU, K9ZU, N2AW, WA3LTJ; (middle) W4TG, W4DOI, K3SX, AJ1DM, WA3KLK, N2DA, Logan; (front) N3IC, KN3U; Not shown: W3MIT, K3MRI, W3CID, KB3LMA
The weather was perfect for the Friday antenna installation, and continued for a fantastic Saturday/Sunday plus a clean breakdown.
Setting Up
A crew arrived Friday afternoon and put up the Rocket Launcher, the beams, and the lower dipoles (no pics of those this year). First Jim tries to use a quadcopter to string up the antenna ropes, but a propeller and the fishline had a fatal attraction for one another (used the potato launcher instead). No pics this year of the rocket launcher assembly.
John's Potato Launcher: first, he prepares it; then pumps up pressure; aims; and FIRE! (this worked better than Robert's bow and arrow purchased at Floyd's circa 1970)
Paul and Logan assemble an antenna
Mike is always climbing on things, here he is arranging coaxial cables neatly -- and Robert joins him
Frank is invaluable to so many aspects of the enterprise: here he looks like he's assaying antenna arrangement, then seems to be helping Al with the logging program
Andy works on an antenna; we better know our knots! And the filters we use to reduce inter-station interference
All of those ropes and cables don't arrange themselves!
One of Al's power centers; Logan's generator for battery charging
Antennas
The 40/20/15 Dipole and 40 Meter Inverted-Vee Wire Beam (difficult to see, the slightly bent vertical pole is supporting coax for the driven element); the "near" 80 Meter Dipole is behind it
The 20 Meter Yagi, plus all of the supporting guy wires supporting it and the 40 Meter beam
The Rocket Launcher Tribander; seemingly we can see the RF emanating from it illuminating the dusk sky!
Some sort of VHF/UHF antenna
Operating
Robert on cw with Alan monitoring (Drew in background on phone); Frank handling phone
Paul and the indispensable Bob on CW
Robert, Al, Mike
Victor runs FT8 and handles messages
John AJ1DM sans potato launcher
Sid K3SX and John W3MIT
Bill and George K9ZU
Alan W4DOI; Mike coaches Joseph KB3LMA
Drew on phone; a busy crew
Night Falls
Andy brings a multitude of LED arrays to keep the monsters at bay
Andy, Craig N2DA, Robert
Joseph KB3LMA and John W3MIT; George K9ZU
(Before dark we had set up our overnight tents)
Youth Participation
At the GOTA Station: with Paul's help visiting sisters Alice and Eve make one QSO each (9 and 12 years old), and Eve fashions a straight key out of a clothespin
Relaxing + Food
Our non-ham friend from Randallstown HS, Carl, makes the trek from Kentucky just to visit (now a recently retired math professor) with Drew; Victor in between tasks
Drew, Bob, Logan, Craig
This looks like a selfie from Carnegie Mellon U. with Frank, John, and Craig -- where's Mike?
The provisions had their own table; the "self-starting" charcoal stubbornly refused to light until we utilized non-approved methods to elicit actual flame (safety officer neither saw nor approved this action)
Success! Burgers on the Barbie.
Breakdown
We used about 10 KWH of energy over the weekend. Breakdown and cleanup is no trivial task. It takes 2-3 hours!
A car needed a hotshot and some of us were surprised when Paul got it started with a cellphone-size battery!
We made sure to leave behind a pristine nature area
We went with three transmitters:
QSO's: 1348 cw/digital x 2 = 2696
+ 1584 phone (GOTA contributed 368) = 4280 x 2 = 8560
+ 1850 bonus points = grand total 10,410
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Congratulations to Bob, who dominates as our top operator! Look at the Operators worksheet in the Logs & Analysis spreadsheet for breakdowns by band, mode, operator, bonus point allocation, pie charts, QSO rates, and more (operator rankings including bonus points differ slightly). The year-to-year comparison worksheet is updated.
--- Results from December 2019 QST ---
This was our highest cw score except for 2018; our highest phone and total score in recent years except for 2017; and our highest GOTA score since 2014. Of course, most of the other years were 1A or 2A! See the RARC Home Page and the year-to-year worksheet in the spreadsheet for comparisons.
We scored 6th out of 309 (98 percentile) in the 3A category. We had the high score in MDC and second highest score in the Atlantic Division (DEL, MDC, EPA, WPA, NNY, WNY, SNJ).
(The overall 3A high score was 13,546 -- ours was 10,410)
Print out a QSL card (pdf format).
for the unzip password
Here are the 2019 FD Weblog notes. You can open them in the main browser window by clicking this.
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(Photos and videos by W4TG, K3MRI, N2DA, Logan, N3IC . Designed to be viewable in 1024 width resolution)