Field Day was a lot different here in Ann Arbor than in years past. Our club, ARROW, cancelled the big event (we have been running Class 4A with a GOTA station), and instead, encouraged everyone to operate in some way from their homes. I certainly missed hanging out with old friends—and meeting new ones—but this new format gave me a chance to try some things that I probably would not have otherwise, including running QRP. And, I still had a lot of fun.
The setup
First of all, I decided to operate Class 1B-Battery. The rules say, “All contacts must be made using an output power of 5 Watts or less and the power source must be something other than commercial mains or motor-driven generator.” To meet these requirements, I used my Elecraft KX3, set to 5 W output and a 9 Ah BioEnno battery. Here’s a photo of the station:
Not only did I power the station with a battery, I charged the battery and operated from solar power. That box next to the battery is an DIYSolar4u Apollo MPPT solar charge controller. The solar panel (shown below) I used was also manufactured by a company here in Michigan called Uni-Solar, which was a subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices. Unfortunately, this company went out of business eight years ago, but before they closed up shop, our club made a big purchase of these panels at liquidation prices.
The solar panel and charge controller worked like a charm. In fact, I’d say that running on solar power was perhaps my biggest success of the weekend. I learned a lot about solar panels and charge controllers. For example, while the sun was shining, the solar panel provided more than enough power to power the KX3 on its own. Of course, I was running only 5W, but it would be interesting to see how much power I could run without starting to deplete the battery.
I probably paid a little more than I had to for the solar charge controller, but it is a quality product and can handle a lot more power than I was using on Field Day. Now, I’m thinking that it might be an interesting project to power my entire station from batteries charged by solar panels year-round. I’d certainly need a bigger battery and a couple more solar panels, but this solar charge controller should be able to handle it.
For an antenna, I used the antenna that we normally use at our GOTA station, a 40-meter/20-meter fan dipole in an inverted-V configuration, supported in the center by a mast built from military-surplus fiberglass poles. I set this up in the flower bed in front of my house (see below). I was mostly successful in my efforts to avoid trampling the flowers and plants, but I’m afraid that one of the hostas lost a few leaves. The good news is that you almost can’t kill hostas, and I’m sure it will recover.
If you haven’t worked with these masts before, let me tell you that putting one up can be kind of tricky. The poles are about four feet long, and you stack them one on top of each other to get the height you want. I have a set of 10 poles. Three are used for the tripod base, leaving seven for the vertical section. That gets the antenna up close to 30 feet.
During a normal Field Day, there are lots of people around to help. This year, though, I had to do it on my own—well, almost all on my own. I decided to quit after stacking six of the poles, and at that point, I asked my wife, Silvia, to hold the mast while I staked down the guy wires. All told, it took me a little less than an hour to untangle the antennas, hoist the mast, and get it all staked down. Not too bad.
How did I do?
I think that I did pretty well. In about 12 hours of operating, I managed to make 225 QSOs, 216 on 40-meter CW and 9 on 20-meter CW. I did try a bit on 15 meters, but no one could hear my 5 W. I worked 20 meters for about an hour and a half on Saturday afternoon, but the band just wasn’t that open, so I gave up and went back to 40 meters..
One mistake that I made was to go to bed early Saturday night, so that I could get up early Sunday morning. I went to sleep at 10 pm and got up at 4 am. I think that in doing this, I missed some prime operating time. I should have tried to stay up till 2 am and then get up around 8 am. I did get to see the sun come up, though, and that was pleasant.
Another pleasant thing was that even though I was running only 5 W, I was able to “run” a frequency a couple of times before a higher power station chased me off. I’m guessing that I made about a dozen contacts during those two periods.
About 10:30 am or so, I had just over 200 contacts, and I was thinking that maybe I could hit 250. Right about that time, though, the activity just tanked. I stuck it out until just before 1 pm, when I hit 225.
Funny story: Sunday evening, some club members got on 2m to share our Field Day experiences. One guy mentioned that he operated FT8 and FT4, and after deleting dupes, he had 226! That kind of frosted me. I probably could have pounded out two more had I known he was at 226.
Bonus points
In addition to trying a different setup, I did get to score bonus points that I wouldn’t normally at our club Field Day operation. It’s not that I don’t want to do them, but they’re normally assigned to other members. For example, Jay, WB8TKL, normally does the traffic handling. Well, this year, I originated some traffic of my own. Of course, Jay is the one who took the traffic from me. Thanks, Jay!
I also set up a public information table (shown below) down by the street so that folks walking by could take one of the flyers underneath the plastic cover. A couple of people did, too, although one of them was my next-door neighbor, and I kind of coerced her into taking it. As she was walking by on Sunday morning, I noticed that she was eying my antenna. I called down to her, “Don’t worry. This is coming down this afternoon.” I also explained a little bit about what I was doing and then got her to take a flyer.
In addition to scoring 100 points each for sending traffic and having a public information table, I scored 450 more bonus points for the following:
- Operated on 100% emergency power (100 points).
- Copied the bulletin (100 points).
- Tweeted while I was operating for the social media bonus (100 points).
- Sent out a press release before the event (100 points).
- Submit my logs electronically (50 points).
So, my total score was 225 QSOs x 10 points/QSO, plus 650 bonus points for a total of 2,900 points!
What did I miss?
I did, of course, miss some of the regular Field Day happenings:
- The food, of course. Every year, someone seems to step up and put on a nice Saturday evening dinner.
- Hanging out with my friends, swapping stories about past Field Days.
- Helping newcomers and non-hams make contacts at the GOTA station. Every year, we get one or two folks who just take to it, and introducing them to the fun of ham radio is just a blast for me.
- Did I mention the food?
Overall, this was a great Field Day, but let’s hope that next year we can return to a more traditional Field Day next year.
Paul says
What’s the board connecting the battery, charge controller, and radio?
Dan KB6NU says
It’s a power connector kit from K9JEB.Com. Check them out!