Tomorrow, of course, is Field Day, and I am the head coach of our Get on the Air (GOTA) station. Since I’m located in Ann Arbor, MI, home of the University of Michigan, I’m calling myself the “Jim Harbaugh” of Field Day.
We’re going to be using the club’s IC-746PRO at the GOTA station, and so just now, I was down in the shack, making sure it still worked. The first thing I had to do was to replace the lugs on the power cable. I don’t know what kind of power supply they had connected it to last, but it had some lugs on it that had some really big holes.
After I’d done that, I hooked up the radio, connected the antenna, and started tuning around the 40m phone band. Geez, are conditions bad right now. I really couldn’t hear anyone, and after calling CQ on 7225 kHz a half dozen times, I moved down to the CW portion of the band.
There, I had some luck working stations, but the signals were very weak. At least, though, I convinced myself that the radio was working. After working a couple of stations, I decided to try phone again.
Tuning around, I ran across AC9LX on 7178. Signals weren’t great, but we could hear each other, and we had a short contact. After our contact ended, N8BUS called AC9LX. Hearing N8BUS got me excited, because not only is it a callsign that spells a word, it’s an all-time new one for me.
After his short contact with AC9LX, I called him, and we talked for a while. Since he lives just southwest of Columbus, OH (home of Ohio State University), we traded friendly jibes about our respective football teams.
When we said 73, I got a call from Tim, WB2PAY! He had heard me talking about collecting QSL cards from stations whose callsigns spell words and offered to send me one of his. How cool is that? “PAY” happens to be another all-time new one, so in the space of 15 minutes, I’d worked two stations whose QSLs I can add to my collection. Field Day is already a success in my book!
Remote operation
A couple of years ago there was a brouhaha about getting DXCC credit for contacts made using “remote superstations.” I contributed a little to that controversy with my blog post on the subject. To recap, I think that these remote superstations are pretty cool, but I’m not sure that operators should get DXCC credit for contacts made while using them.
I did, however, hear about one use for them that I thought was pretty cool. Mark, W8MP, subscribes to one of these services, and he was telling me about how he recently used one of these stations.
As it turns out, a friend of his son was putting up some kind of antenna, and when he found out, he volunteered to contact him using one or more (I forget exactly) of these stations. These contacts helped prove out the antennas, and I think, made great use of this service.
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