Field Day 2022

Location: Gifford Pinchot National Forest
Participants: K7SFQ, KC7BEY, W7JMP
Pack List
Plan

In the end we made 291 QSO's, 209 CW and 82 SSB. What a blast! Enjoy the pictures.
Log

Campsite Selection. The road was pretty rough deeper into the woods, but we found a good spot where the road was decent and it already had a fire ring.

Friday night campfire and dinner. It was too dark to set up antennas yet.

We woke up around 6AM on Saturday. After our breakfast campfire we got started setting up solar chargers.

First station set up, by around 10 AM!

A drone is used to get ropes very high into the trees. KC7BEY has perfected this method!

This is our VHF stack: a 6m Moxon rectangle and a 2m 3-element quad. We didn't make very many contacts with it, but I was able to participate in the PNW VHF society Sunday net for the first time.

Raising the 120' doublet up into the air. KC7BEY made the ladder-line from PEX tubing. I cannot stress enough how incredibly high up into the canopy he was able to pull this antenna using the drone with relatively minimal effort. From the ground we estimated it was up at least 90 feet.

All of us operating on Saturday afternoon. KC7BEY was in the middle of raising an additional 40m dipole so we'd have a great signal into CA that evening.

Additional 40m dipole, up around 50' or so and oriented north-south. Look how flat these antennas are!

Arial drone footage, looking towards the horizon above our campsite and back down to the camp. You can see the antennas in the canopy.

Deep into operating on Saturday evening.

Saturday night we were pleasantly surprised to running a pile-up on 80m! Lots of stations reporting we had a big signal, all thanks to that doublet up >100'.

When we took down the antenna we marked the feedline where it touched the ground and it was up at least 109' at the lowest point!! No wonder it was so effective on 80m! I had to take two pictures because we had a 100' tape measure. Also note the well-executed Western-Union splice.

Created 26 June 2022.
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