KB9SSS Goes "Solo" for Field Day

Introduction

I've talked about doing FD from the nearby parking garage. While it has proven to be a better location that my own home in terms of antenna height and performance, it's lack of security makes it unsuited for a solo contest effort. A group effort would probably work out fine there. I ended up at my father-in-law's place (Dick, KC9ST) alongside Pine Creek near Rainsville, IN. The location is quite remote, which forced me to plan carefully. It also solved many logistical problems (bed, bathroom, security, etc...) which allowed me to concentrate on the station itself. Dick, Donna, and their neighbor were very tolerant and kind, particularly when I qualified for my WAN award. My FD would not have been a success (or as much fun) without their support.

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Report Card

Technically, that gives me an overall score of B-. Lots of room for improvement. However, in terms of enjoyment, I get an A+!

I made 290 QSO's, all on SSB. Along the way, I've learned a lot. At the risk or boring everyone, here are some of my observations.

Equipment

Icom IC-746 Tranceiver, all band (160m - 2m), all mode Radio Shack speaker MFJ antenna tuner Alpha Delta DX-CC, 80/40/20/15/10, parallel dipole antenna Alpha Delta DX-EE, 40/20/15/10, parallel dipole antenna Outbacker, portable 12 ft vertical antenna (80-10m) 2 100Ah Powersonic gel-cell batteries Compaq laptop computer (logging and PSK) Simo 120Vac power inverter PSK interface 9 x 13 screened enclosure folding chair 700 feet of nylon rope 200 feet of wire for antennas 2 50 ft coils of RG-8 coax 1 100 ft coil of RG-8/U coax Water and snacks for 72 hours A whole box of misc cables, wires, tools, etc... most of it unneeded

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Actually, my water supply only lasted 48 hours. It was very hot and muggy.

Two items were thought to have been packed, but are still missing:

• Sling Shot for stringing lines into trees
• CW key

• Hammer for pounding in stakes (for guy ropes)

I did not bring a table or any of my camping supplies. I used Dick's on-site lawn furniture for that.

Some of what I brought was not needed and possibly could have been trimmed back a bit, but I figured "Better save than sorry".

Stringing lines into trees

My second idea was to use KC9ST's extension ladder as a makeshift tower. We couldn't find it. One of the geese must have run off with it. Dick came up with the final solution. He used a fishing poll to cast a line 60 feet up; on the first attempt. Many of you know that I have extremely poor eyesight. I discovered that even when I get a fishing line into a tree, I can not find the line on the other side. The weeds were tall enough that even a broom handle might have been invisible. A coworker gave me an idea that I'll be working on for next year. A beeper for the shot weight or arrow. Just track down the sound, and I'll find the line. Of course, if it ever got stuck in the tree . . .

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Power conservation

First, I operated my area lighting via dry cells and turned off all the meter lights I could. Ultimately, I have a project involving high intensity/efficiency LEDs that should provide area lighting in the long term. Second, I closed the lid on my laptop whenever possible which reduces the laptop load by about 1-2 amps. I also tried to adjust the laptop's CPU speed and other settings to conserve more power, however, the laptop would only use those settings when in was solely on internal power. While on the inverter, the laptop still consumed full power. Those steps should have extended my operating time out to about 20 hours, but I actually did much better than that.

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I deduced that if the only way to get the laptop to operate in power conservation mode was to operate it on battery power, then that was what I would do. I'd operate for almost two hours on the internal battery and then operate for about 20 minutes on inverter power to recharge. I'm still working out the numbers on how much power I saved. I'm hoping to figure out how to change the laptop's full-power behavior as well.

Also, I over estimated the amount of power the transceiver would consume. I assumed a 20/2 amp ration of transmitting to receiving at a duty cycle of 3:1. That works out to an average load of 4 amps ((3*2 + 1*20)/4). That was based upon 13.6 VDC, but at my battery voltages, transmitting only draws about 17 amps. Likewise, S+P duty cycles are more like 10:1 than the value I assumed. That works out to about 3.3 amps ((10*2 + 1*17)/11). Furthermore, receive takes less power with headphones than with a speaker, but I have yet to measure that.

Finally, I've discovered that most good gel-cells are rated by their "minimum" available capacity; they often provide more, particularly in the earlier part of their lifespan and under elevated temperatures.

In the long haul (and with these batteries, I do mean "haul") I'll either need to get a third battery for a total capacity of 300 Ah, or I need to generate supplemental power. I'm looking into both options.

Another project for the long haul will have to be battery monitoring. I had no way in the field of gauging how much battery capacity I had left. Comparing the residual voltages on the batteries with their published power discharge curves show that I had used 50% and 60% of their capacities. At the temperature adjusted starting capacities, that comes out to a usage of 121 Ah. How can that be??? I had to use more power than that. I have to go over everything very carefully again to see what's happening.

If you can hear them ...

In fact, switching antennas had little effect upon reception. The receiver inside my IC-746 works too well; tantalizing me with signals I can't make contact with. Switching to uncrowned bands (like 10m and 15m) verified that people could indeed hear me when there was no pile-up. I tried a few times to turn this around and call CQ instead of doing S+P. My logic was, I seem to be able to hear everyone, but only a few people seem to be able to hear me. If I call CQ, then only people I can hear will answer; leading to more/faster contacts. It didn't work. Very few people could hear me, including new people who would come to my spot in the band and start calling CQ on top of me. I could never hold a frequency for long.

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At the moment, I see only a few options for increasing my "punch" to get myself heard.

Increase power. I was transmitting at only about 50-60 watts. Increasing my supply voltage (and power consumption) would get me up to 100-110 watts. That 3db gain could make a big difference in a pile-up. In fact, maybe I could run my rig QRP like N9GKE keeps joking about ... QRP into his linear. Run an external amplifier at 149 watts to get my signal heard. Naw, the power requirements would be brutal.

Better feedline. I used a 100 ft section of RG-8/U for my feed. Pre-tuner SWR was typically below 2:1. Maybe I could do better, but not by a huge margin.

Better antenna. 3-6 db of gain from a beam antenna would help, but that vastly complicates setup and might not be practical. Of course, getting my antenna up higher and/or flatter would also have helped.

Preprocess my transmitted signal via frequency equalization and compression. I already do some of this, to great benefit. I'm not sure how much more can be done.

Actually, I do have another thought. I noticed that anytime a "YL" was detected, they immediately went to the top of the pile. I probably heard "Only the YL..." more than a hundred times while sitting in a pileup. If I used one of those voice changers to make myself sound like . . .

Antenna Performance

It would not tune up on 80m, even though that's one of its design bands. I did not trim the wires for resonance when I hoisted the antenna, so I knew that the resonance would be a bit low. I assumed I could make up the difference with one of my antenna tuners. I was wrong.

I was also wrong about maybe tuning the antenna up on 160m, but that isn't really very surprising. All the other bands (10m, 15m, 20m, 40m) worked just fine with SWR below 2:1 across their bands. This wasn't just a problem with the rig's internal tuner, my external tuner wouldn't match it either. Both the rig and the tuner meter showed infinite SWR when using my external tuner. Like I mentioned above, I know the wires, as shipped, are a little long to allow for trimming, but this was WAY out of whack. Curious, in that W9REG apparently had matching problems with their DX-CC antennas as well. (one with 15m and the other with 20m).

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Fortunately, my little 12 ft vertical did tune up just fine and filled in adequately.

Comparing the 12 ft Outbacker to the 82ft DX-CC at 40ft was educational. 99% of the stations I could hear on the dipole were copyable on the short vertical, usually with no discernable drop in volume or quality. I expected a bigger difference, due to polarization if nothing else.

Transmissions were another matter. It was clear that the dipole radiated a stronger signal than the vertical. That isn't exactly a surprise, but the difference was striking. It underscores the importance of a better antenna system if I want to punch through the pileups.

40 meters - the bonus band

Much to my surprise, most of my contacts were on 40 meters. Even more surprising, almost half of the 40m contacts were in the daylight. I stumbled onto this almost by accident, as I didn't take 40m seriously for daylight contacts; there's just no skip during the daylight. However, for FD its quantity, not distance, that counts. The ground wave propagation was still good for several hundred miles allowing me to make several dozen contacts to OH, MI, and WI. Additionally, the pile ups were small and easily managed, thus the other stations could hear me fine. Yes, the atmospheric noise on 40m during the day was pretty horrendous, but my IC-746 performed wonderfully. I ended up using all of its features on Sunday morning, to good effect.

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I still can't copy CW at 35 wpm

I have to admit that I simply do not enjoy CW. However, it's sort of a matter of pride that drives me to keep working on it. I may have passed the 13 wpm test for my Advanced license, but I can only reliably operate at about 7-8 wpm. The 20-40 wpm typically being used during contests (most contest loggers default to 35 wpm) is just beyond my abilities. However, Dick (KC9ST) made an insightful observation. He said my problem was my operating style. When I operate S+P, the CQ folks don't bother to slow down for me. However, if I operated CQ, then people operating S+P would slow down to my speed. The S+P folks are usually working at a slower, more diligent pace and will be more motivated to slow down to my speed for the contact. The S+P folks are searching for points and will go to greater efforts to obtain them. The CQ folks are waiting for points to fall into their laps and won't go to as great an effort to make the contact.

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No PSK for Muck Less than 2 weeks before FD, I was operating PSK from home. Then during FD, the equipment would not work. I'll have to look into that. Wildlife There was quite a bit of wildlife at my location. I'm not just talking about the chickens, dogs, geese, cats, ducks, or donkeys; although there was plenty of them to go around. At one point, the donkeys were loud enough to be heard (and remarked upon) over the air. I also had giant mosquitoes, a young buck, a 5 foot black snake, and a pesky mole. The mole tunnels were everywhere and I did not pay much attention to them, until about 2am when a mole went through the tunnel I was sitting on. I'm not sure what word best describes what I went through when it happened. There was no need for any caffeine that hour! One thing I did learn: do not set up station under a shedding mulberry tree. The falling berries made quite a mess and left a few stains.

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Equipment Hood As an experiment, I prototyped a hood for my laptop. It was to serve 3 purposes. Shade the screen from the sun. Protect the keyboard from any dripping water. Provide a mount for lights at night. For the purposes of this experiment, I went cheap. I bought, then butchered, a $3 Rubbermaid-like container and used mounting tape to put some battery operated closet lights in the top. The experiment was a success. I plan to do something more elaborate next year.

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Lighting Besides the light inside my laptop hood, the only other light I used was a small headband headlamp. These little things are amazing. They use high intensity LEDs and AAA batteries to give you 100-160 hours of very convenient task lighting. I highly recommend them. The other lighting experiment I did involved safety lights. I taped some cheap glow-in-the dark bracelets to my guy ropes and such to make them highly visible at night. It worked beautifully.

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The future . . .

What if I treat my club participation as a solo event? I would simply take responsibility for a station (mine) and follow it through as if I were doing it solo. Maybe I should just put together a dedicated 40m station, or perhaps take charge of the GOTA station.

Of course, I might yet talk my father-in-law into doing field day next year. He's a hard core CW fanatic, and doing a 2B station would be quite a challenge.

We'll have to see.

In summary, my "solo" station was successful, educational, and fun. I highly recommend that others try it too.

Dana, KB9SSS