Ham Radio - A contact sport

I was able to spend a little time with the Story County ARC for Field Day this year. Unfortunately, the timing was poor as it coincided with my high school class reunion. However, I was able to be there for some of the setup and an hour or so of operating and talking to the guys. Probably the most fun for me was to see the youngsters who came to find out what radio was about. A friend of mine from church (Mike, KC0WKE) who had only had a license for a month or two and had never been on HF stopped by and I goated him into making his first QSO on HF. That was pretty cool - first ham radio HF QSO.

Bill, K0KT, was in charge of the project and did an awesome job. In fact, in my 25+ years of ham radio, I think this is possibly the most organized effort in which I’ve been involved. He wrote a great post-mortem report of the event.

The ICOM 746s performed well, logging software worked, the wifi link worked, pretty much everything went as expected. Only downsides were:

• Not enough antenna testing prior to contest start.  The 40 meter wire dipole mounted on the roof had some issues.
• Dedicated station schedules never seem to work. I don’t know why, but a detailed schedule setup a month before the contest doesn’t pan out on field day.
• Balancing CW vs SSB vs Digital mode operators is a challenge.

Of course, lack of proper setup/preparation is par for the course for Field Day. Again, as the team leader, K0KT did an awesome job and fought fires well under pressure.
I’m already looking forward to FD2007.