Field Day 2025
"Year of the Thunderstorms"
(Revised 11/5/2025)
Location: Washington Monument State Park (Boonsboro, Maryland)
Date:
June 28-29, 2025
Facebook:
Randallstown ARC
I'm getting lazy curating the photographs. I will include 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. Also, nobody's lenses caught a few of our ops -- sorry!
Location, Location, Location!
The Washington Monument State Park itself.
Setting Up
Raising the Rocket Launcher.
Raising the Rohn Tower with tribander.
Rohn Tower with tribander completed.
The VHF log periodic antenna and the Potato Launcher used to put up the Far 80 Meter dipole (and others).
Power
Solar Panels for our Alternate Power contact bonus; the gas generator for charging the batteries.
New for 2025: Lee constructed a patch panel for the antenna connections; and a quizzical brain trust investigates some pre-contest rig/N1MM problem.
Operating
Shelter views
Our #1, #2, and #3 points-getters: N2DA, NC3Y, N2AW.
GOTA Op KK6IC trains for FD, then operates with "coach" N3IC.
K3MZ coaches the GOTA station; students work on Andy's antenna exercise.
KN3U, WA3PYU, and energetic FD organizer W4TG.
NC3Y, KC3YJD, and K3MZ at night.
W3CA and WA3MJZ work 6 meter FT8 while W3CID handles WinLink.
K3MRI and WA3PYU/AC3N.
As usual, the crew required an energy source as well (:>)
We continued with three transmitters:
QSO's: 1945 cw/digital x 2 = 3890
+ 909 phone = 4799 x 2 = 9598
+ 2490 bonus points = grand total 12,088
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Congratulations to Craig who again was 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 2025 QST ---
We scored 2nd out of 317 (99.68 percentile) in the 3A category (our new highest rank). We had the high score in MDC and in the Atlantic Division (DEL, MDC, EPA, WPA, NNY, WNY, SNJ). Our score was up somewhat but only our fourth highest QSO points; CW up, phone down. GOTA had less than last year, which has an exaggerated effect because of the x5 bonus for those contacts. Also, we lost 99 minutes of operating time due to thunderstorm shutdown Saturday night! I fail to understand winner K0RV's numbers: 37,617 QSO's and 77,696 points??? We are told that these are simply incorrect listings. The actual values are 367 QSO's and a score of 4,878. This makes us #2!
Print out a QSL card (pdf format).
for the unzip password
Here is an automated community comments page for us. This makes it easier than emailing everybody in the list (who might not be interested). Scroll down to the bottom of the page to add new comments. But this will only work if we check it fairly frequently to catch everyone's posts. You can open the Weblog in the main browser window by clicking this.
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(Photos and videos by WA3IRQ, N2DA, Logan, N3IC/W4TG. Designed to be viewable in 1024 width resolution)