KF3M	Hanover Area Hamming Association Hanover, Pennsylvania

Field Day

June 28 and 29, 2008

We sat up on the carnival grounds of the Pleasant Hill Fire Company. This is about five miles South of Hanover, Pennsylvania. It is a nice location on top of a small hill. There is lots of room. The only limitation is that we run out of antenna supports before we run out of antenna ideas. Our plans were to enter the 2A category with a VHF/UHF station. No GOTA station was planned. We would just take a new operator and pair him up with a seasoned operator at one of the stations. We learned at the last minute that several guest operators were planning to join us. So we added a third transmitter and became 3A. The lack of suitable trees for antennas would come back to haunt us for this decision. We had some bad weather Saturday night. Otherwise we had a great Field Day.

	This was our home for the weekend. The generator is on the left. All stations were located in the pavilion in the center of the picture. Outside the pavilion were the VHF/UHF antennas on a 20 foot mast. A tri-band yagi on the trailer tower was used for 20, 15 and 10 meters. A 40 meter dipole ran from the tower to the tree behind the pavilion. This was a dynamite antenna. At first we had a G5RV running from the tower to a 40 foot mast off the left side of the picture. This was later replaced with a Carolina Windom that ran from the tower to the back stop of a baseball field off the right side of the picture. The white building to the left of the generator is a professional kitchen. We do eat well!
	Here is a better picture of the antennas. The wire antennas had not been raised when this picture was taken. Note of the angry looking clouds.
	This is the 40 foot mast that held the far end of the G5RV antenna until it was replaced.
	HF Station Number 1 was an Icom IC-735. It was used mostly on 80 meters but made a few contacts on 15 meters. The antenna was a G5RV with a loooong feed line. As expected, it performed poorly. We had a Carolina Windom as a spare but we were not able to move the 40 foot mast far enough to get it up. Generally there are little league baseball games on this site all day Saturday. But there were no games this day. So we ran the Carolina Windom from the tower, across the empty parking lot, to the backstop at the baseball field. This antenna worked very well.
	HF Station Number 2 was an Icom IC-706. It stayed on 40 meters all weekend. The antenna was a dipole up 40 feet. It ran from the tower to a tree just behind this operating position. No DX, but this was a good antenna for Field Day. The antenna tuner on top of the transceiver was not used. Each station had a laptop for logging. All were networked to a server that was just to the left of this station.
	HF Station Number 3 was a Ten-Tec Paragon. It operated mainly on 20 meters using the tri-band yagi. There was a nice 15 meter opening Sunday morning. 10 meters tried to open but all we worked was some short skip - maybe sporadic E. Notice the plastic sheeting that we wrapped around the entire pavilion as protection from the forecasted rain.
	Another picture of HF Station Number 3. At 8:30 p.m. Saturday a squall line hit us. We estimated that the wind was 50 to 60 miles per hour with very heavy rain. We completed disassembled all of the stations and moved everything to the leeward corner of the pavilion. Notice the plastic sheeting now battered by the storm and completely missing in places. Otherwise there was no damage. We lost 2 hours and 15 minutes of operating time. This picture also shows the band pass filters on the rear of the table. These were used at all stations and we had no interference problems.
	The VHF/UHF Station operated on 6 meters, 2 meters, and 70 centimeters. It used a Yasu FT-847 plus a 115 watt amplifier on 70 centimeters. A yagi for each band was on a 20 mast.
	This is the VHF/UHF Station during the night shift.
	Sunday morning and there is time to relax before we start to pack up for another year.
	Watts? Yup we got some of those.
	We have lots of Watts.
	We furnished luxurious sleeping accommodations for the off duty operators.

So, for all of this effort expended, what did we accomplish? The purpose of Field Day is to demonstrate that we can set up a station without the aid of any permanent facilities. And then operate for 24 hours. We certainly did that. When this page was written the logs were not available. The numbers below are from a backup log that does not include the last several minutes. The final numbers will be slightly better that shown here.

We made 1266 contacts - 1016 SSB, 250 CW and no digital. We operated all bands from 80 meters through 70 centimeters, except 1.25 meters. We worked 47 states, missing Alaska, South Dakota and Wyoming. We worked six of the Canadian Sections - missing Saskatchewan, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.

We could have done better with the bonus points. We did not get the message to the SCM, the formal NTS messages or the natural power QSOs. Sadly, we were prepared to do these. It seemed that the storm dampened our enthusiasm and they were not attempted. We also missed the educational activity bonus. We had planned on having several little league players visit us. There were no games this weekend. We attempted a Satellite QSO but failed. We had no GOTA station.

It looks like we finished up with just over 4000 points.

Fun does not show up in the score. But we had lots of it. That alone made the weekend worth while.

This contest is sponsored by the ARRL. Results will be available on their web site in a few months. Until the results are posted, you will find the Soapbox interesting reading.

Check out what we did at Field Day 2007.
Check out what we did at Field Day 2006.
Check out what we did at Field Day 2005.

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