continued from part I…
I went home, which is only 15 minutes away from the Field Day site, and got about four hours of sleep. I got back to the site about 3:45 am. Arun, W8ARU was turning and burning on the CW station, so I caught a few more ZZZZs while waiting for him to turn the station over to me. I got on about 5 am (see below).
I was surprised that the band was still so active, and even though Arun complained about not being able to find stations that we hadn’t worked already, I was able to find some. And, when I set up on a frequency and started calling CQ, I found plenty of activity. At one point, I got the rate up to over 90 Qs per hour—for a short time anyway.
I don’t know how many contacts that I made, but I think that I acquitted myself pretty well before handing the controls over to Tim, KT8K sometime between 6:30 am and 7:00 am. I got back on a little later, relieving Tim for a while, and even then was able to find stations to work. I think that because the band conditions were so good, that there were more stations on and we could hear more of them, so that we just continued to find stations that weren’t dupes.
After breakfast, we set up the GOTA station again. The first operator of the morning was Aaron, KD8QQA. Aaron turned into the GOTA star for 2017. Over the course of the next hour or so, he made 20 contacts, qualifying for the GOTA bonus points! Aaron would make a few more contacts for us later in the day, when I twisted his arm a little to help us get over 2,000 contacts.
The rest of the day was devoted to racking up points. Sometime around 10:00 am, we surpassed our 2016 QSO total of 1,650. About 1:30 pm, only a half hour before the end of the event, we’d made it to about 1,950. At that point, I went around to all of the stations to urge them on. We hit 2,000 right about 1:50 pm, and our final total was 2,024! What a great effort.
The last two GOTA contacts were made by Ruth Tabeling, W8AWT’s mother. We got her into the operator’s chair about 1:50 pm, and we managed to make two Qs before shutting down. She was operator #11.
Teardown went pretty fast as usual, and by 3:30 pm, I was all packed up and ready to go. Another Field Day was in the books.
Even before I left the site, I was thinking about next year. For example, even though my 20m/40m fan dipole has worked so well over the years, we might want to try non-resonant doublet with an antenna tuner to allow us to work more bands.
I also think that we want to try to have two CW stations, as we have in the past. The club wants me to teach a CW class, and I think that I’ll make it a goal that all of the students will be able to operate a CW station at next year’s Field Day.