2025 Summer Field Day Wrap-Up
Come all, ham certificate or not, and experience UARC Field Days. This event was held on June 28-29, 2025.
This year’s field days was at the club campus with all activities and radio stations deployed totally independent of the clubhouse radio facilities. Every radio stations was on the lawn with batteries and generator power, every antenna was temporary. It was a true field simulation. Well, the club house did offer restrooms and a cool – dry respite from the occasional muggy conditions -but that’s it!
Click here for a little tase of field day prep and operations.
The June 28-29 Field Day event has come and gone, but is not forgotten.
This year’s event day started out early in the morning with members gathering to ready the club house for visitors, but more importantly to set up the Field Day power sources and put up antennas as Field Day is a complete simulation of what might be emergency operations with off the grid power sources and site specific deployment of specific antennas for the radios in use. UARC erected 4 stations: one CW , two voice and an FT8 digital station. All stations were tested and operational at 8:00 AM- the official start of the Field Day. Operations continued through Sunday at 8:AM. The day had a mix of weather from bright sunshine to black ominous overcast to momentary torrential downpours. Then, everything was taken down and packed away to wait for a real emergency or the next Field Day.
The Field Day Contact wrap up from Pierre:
Whew, that was a hot, strenuous Field Day. But it was carried through to a successful conclusion, with cleanup finished by 3:30 pm Sunday After de-duping, the log showed a total of 952 QSO’s. Each one represented an effort by an operator, sometimes a multi-minute battle with static, interference and poor propagation. On Saturday afternoon there were a lot of lightning crashes on the radio, with audible thunder around us for two or three hours. But we never had close lightning strikes, and operations continued. To put the QSO total in perspective, it was up slightly from last year’s 893 but not as good as our record years of 2022 and 2023. The location worked out pretty well, and the air-conditioned club house was very much appreciated! We launched five antennas for this event: separate dipoles for 20, 40, and 80 meter SSB, a dual-band dipole for Digital, and an OCF multiband dipole for CW. However, the two SSB stations were understaffed and often one was idle. Nobody worked 80m Phone after dark. So for next year, maybe we can reduce our transmitter count to 3A and save the effort of hauling up the 80m Phone antenna. Inter-station interference was mostly acceptable, except when the Digital and Phone stations were both on 20 meters. Those two dipoles were end-to-end on the north side of the field. We should find a way to increase the separation next time. In fact, we might consider using a multiband dipole for the Phone station. The we would have just three antennas to launch, and could keep them far apart. We had enough coaxial cable, but found ourselves short of barrel connectors (SO-239 female-female adapters). That would be a worthwhile addition to our Field Day kit. It was impressive how well the club members worked together to make this operation a success. Bunny must have shot his air cannon over trees at least a dozen times; Tony provided the generator and got the logging laptops running (no small task); Jeff and Angie provided food and others brought cold drinks. George was everywhere, fetching and carrying materials, finding hidden items in the shed, and getting things to where they needed to go. Setup was mostly complete an hour before the starting gun at 2 pm. Thanks to all who participated, too many to mention by name. We also had a few drop-by visitors, though we could have wished for more. 73 Pierre Thomson, KA2QPG