2025 Summer Field Day

A few highlights from Summer Field Day 2025, operating at Sukanen Ship Museum.

Banner

Our club had been talking about getting a new banner for public events. We all agreed it would be a good thing to have for official promotion and being visible in the community. I designed one based on our website branding and put in an order with VistaPrint. I left it too late and expected delivery was into July. However, it arrived early and we had it for Field Day! We put it up on the Firehall where we were operating but it is designed to be deployed on the front of a folding table. I was really happy with how it turned out!

Antenna Setup

We had 4 stations running with 3 antennas. The 160M EFHW, A DX Commander and a G5RV. This was the first time our club hasn’t used a Yagi for Field Day. It’s always good to try different setups I think. Also, not setting up the beam, AKA Skull Crusher, was also super great. If we had a portable tip up mast for it, that would be sweet. I think the game plan is to incorporate that into a trailer build in the future.

Stations

Using our triplexer and band pass filters, we had 4 stations setup. For day time, we had 20M, 15M and 10M on the DX Commander. 40M was on the G5RV. Midday we switched the 20M station to the 160M antenna. It performed amazingly well with contacts from Alaska to Texas, Maryland to California and we even picked up Montana which is an amazing feat in and of itself for 20M from our QTH!

VE5DMP: The Face of Ham Radio

President Dave will be going on the next promotional pamphet! LOL

Low Band Bust

I had high hopes that our Top Band deployment would have us rolling in contacts but alas, conditions were heinous with terrible atmospherics. We made zero contacts on 80M and 160M. We even dialed up the Utah WebSDR and listened. We could barely hear ourselves on 80M and absolutely zilch on 160M. So we will try this deployment again at Winter Field Day and see how we do.

A Note on Logging

Logging contacts is and has always been the Achilles Heel of Field Day. N1MM has got to be the most glitch-filled, clunky, pain in the butt setup I have ever seen. Every Field Day it is always a constant fight to get this software syncing and connecting to all of our stations. I came across World Radio League and all the innovative stuff they are doing to make logging contacts simple in (((#CurrentYear))). Our club elected not to use it this year but I really, really hope we can use it going forward.

WRL current protocol is that everyone signs into the same club account and logs simultaneously into the same log online. And, you can use phones instead of windowz only computers on a LAN. Totally awesome! In the end, N1MM couldn’t sync to WSJT-X for FT8 contacts for some random, unexplained reason. Another spectacular fail for that platform. The faster we can upgrade to WRL the better as far as I’m concerned.

73 de VE5REV