Field Day 2022
"Covid-19 year III"
(Revised 12/2/2022)
Location: Washington Monument State Park (Boonsboro, Maryland)
Date:
June 25-26, 2022
Facebook:
Randallstown ARC
HamCommunity:
Randallstown/NIH ARC
The crew: 2022 attendees left to right: WA3IRQ, N3IC, WA3PYU, KN3U (front); K3MRI, W3CID, K3MZ, AJ1DM, Logan, N2DA, W4TG (back); not shown: N2AW, W3MIT, KI3C
FD2022 came amidst the virus pandemic recovery phase. All of us (senior citizens!) were fully vaccinated and we were outdoors -- so we went back to "normal" operations. The park was open without restriction. The weather was tremendous -- it only started raining a bit after we had taken down the antennas (that's why the group picture above is in the shelter with the flash!).
I'm getting lazy curating the photographs. I've included a sampling here, but scroll to the very bottom and click on the links for the complete full-resolution online repositories -- who knows how long they will persist, though.
Setting Up
Friday; the tribander on the rocket tower.
Friday; the second tribander on the Rohn tower.
Antennas
The Rocket and Rohn tribanders (solar panel for natural power contacts in second photo), 6 meter antenna, and 40 meter Moxon.
Location
Operating
KN3U, WA3IRQ, N2AW
K3MZ, KC3TRJ, K3MRI, WA3PYU
N2DA, W3MIT, W4TG
N3IC, Logan, W3CID, and top op AJ1DM (what's in his bottle?)
GOTA Visitors
Morse Code!
AJ1DM came prepared. He had the youngsters who happened along to our shelter construct code practice oscillators -- and then taught them to send their names, going back to the oldest technology.
General Visitors
Some were coaxed into operating GOTA, others into the CW class.
Other
Batteries and the generator to charge them powered us.
The first time the 80m vee went up it had to come right back down because the coax pulled out of its SO-239; Robert and Mike spliced another coax section on (lucky it's so low frequency) before putting it back up into the trees. Logan kept the grill going!
Overnight
Some of us set up full camping tents or a hammock... others simply roughed it inside a Tesla.
...while others kept the QSO's going.
We went with three transmitters:
QSO's: 1912 cw/digital x 2 = 3824
+ 1114 phone (GOTA contributed 114) = 4938 x 2 = 9,876
+ 1410 bonus points = grand total 11,286
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Congratulations to John, who again took the honor from Bob (who was only able to attend part-time) 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 2022 QST ---
This was our second highest score ever (last year was our best); 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 4th out of 320 (98.75 percentile) in the 3A category. We had the high score in MDC as well as the Atlantic Division (DEL, MDC, EPA, WPA, NNY, WNY, SNJ).
(The overall 3A high score was 16,700 -- ours was 11,286)
W3MIT notes that we'd have been #3 nationally in the 4A category! (again)
Print out a QSL card (pdf format).
for the unzip password
Here are the 2022 FD Weblog notes. You can open them in the main browser window by clicking this.
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(Photos and videos by WA3IRQ, AJ1DM, N2DA, Logan, W4TG, N3IC . Designed to be viewable in 1024 width resolution)