Field Day 2018 has come and gone, and while I’ll do a more complete report on our club’s entire operation in a future blog post, I do want to give a quick report on the GOTA station, as that’s my main responsibility for Field Day. The bottom line is that it seemed to be a lot more fun this year than last. I think that the main reason for this is that we had more kids than last year.
Don, AC8TO, was the guy who was mainly responsible for this. He’s an assistant coach for a local Science Olympiad team here in the Ann Arbor area, and this year, he was able to get several of the students on the team to come out to Field Day. Most of them made some contacts at the GOTA station.
Don was one of five GOTA coaches we had at this year’s Field Day, including Rich KA8BMA, Quentin KD8IPF, Don AC8TO, Charles W8HAX, and yours truly.
I think that we all pretty much had a blast. Quentin suggested that next year we should have t-shirts, and I’m putting that on my list.
Equipment-wise, we tried something new this year. We ran the station off solar power. Tom, W8TAM, provided the batteries and solar panels, and never once did we get anywhere near taxing the system. It ran flawlessly.
What didn’t run so flawlessly was my ICOM IC-7300. Although this was the exact same radio that we used last year for the GOTA station, we found that the 40m CW station was overloading the front end, making it next to useless. Instead, we used the University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club’s TS-590. Dave, N8SBE, suggested that the reason that it worked so well last year is that we had only one CW station, and when that station was on 40m, the GOTA station was on 20m and vice versa. This year, with two CW stations, it was a lot harder to avoid that interference.
All told, we made 80 contacts by twelve different operators. Jason, pictured above, had a real feel for how to operate, and after a little instruction, cranked his way through 11 contacts. He would have made more, but we ran out of time. He logged his last “Q” at 1759Z. Four or five other Science Olympiad students also made contacts.
We got a couple of new hams on the air, too. Our GOTA station “stars” included Greg, KE8HXR, and Mitch, K8UCH. Both made 20 or more contacts, thereby scoring bonus points!
We also had some other visitors score points for us, although not at the GOTA station. I was showing a couple around the Field Day site on Sunday, when we stumbled into one of the phone stations. Since no one was operating the station at the time, I slid into the logger’s chair, and invited one of the guests to sit in the operator’s chair. She had a great radio voice, and we proceeded to knock down a few QSOs. I was also told that our town’s mayor showed up late Saturday night (after I’d hit the sack), and he made at least one contact on one of the phone stations.
If your Field Day operation didn’t have a GOTA station, you really should think about one for next year. They’re a lot of fun, help new hams get on the air, and crate a lot of goodwill for ham radio.