I have been looking forward to Winter Field Day and it was indeed a lot of fun. I picked Nebo Lake near Holton, KS since it is close and the facilities are well maintained. The terrain isn’t ideal for my current antenna, an offset dipole. Since I need tall trees to put this antenna up I had to decide to be on a hill where the trees were short, or near the lake shore where there are tall trees but my signal would be masked to the north. I ended up picking the hill, so as to not exclude northern potential contacts. The view was beautiful even though the weather was gloomy.
You can set up 24 hours prior to the event so I opted to do that so as not to be rushed. The hike in was about 100m, which isn’t far, but I really need better carts as moving the equipment was awkward. The photo above shows a grey box which has the stove and camp tools, the black box which is radio equipment, and the wood box which is the batteries. The boxes also serve as tabletops after the items are taken out. Setup takes about 2 hours.
The weather made solar less efficient, but I got a little power from it. It rained all day Saturday but the tent did very well. I focused on digital contacts mostly, and we ran the station most of the 24 hour period, excluding about 3am – 8am.
We ended up with just under 70 contacts throughout the US and Canada, since I was able to talk to both coasts often it appears my reach was pretty good. I have ordered a multi band vertical antenna from DX Commander and am looking forward to it as this will allow me to set up away from tall trees.
One of my main goals for this event, besides making contacts, was getting a better understanding of battery management. I am using 2 70Ah gel lead acid batteries. I shut down the station from time to time to compare the reading of Amp hours used on the Powerwerx power meter I have vs voltage readings of idle batteries and found that I can use about 30Ah safely (with an ample buffer) and this gives me roughly 8 hours of continuous transmit activity from full charge.
The goal for my next event will be focusing on voice contacts. Most of my contacts are digital, but I found that the pool of people to talk too in contests runs out eventually so learning to manage voice will help broaden potential contacts in future contests. I have been avoiding voice since, for me, it is more difficult to manage logging and picking out faint signals.
I really enjoyed Winter Field Day and am looking forward to doing more contests and Parks on the Air.