Field Day 2014

[WA1TRY]

If 6m opens you can have a ball. I have a portable setup that we can use for holding up antennas. The club has a 4 element 6 meter beam and a 4 element 2 beam. We can stack them and with three sand bags and my mini-tripod thingy we should be able to get them up about 20 or more feet. That would work fine. Maybe we can even dust off the old rotater and use that. All we need would be one of those small 100 watt rigs that Dan suggested.

What does John, K1LYP, have for rigs?

- Rich

From past experience; yes the VHF/UHF can work in the same tent as SSB, of course headphones are almost required. The IC-706MkII and FT-857 work great for this kind of op.

You only need to worry about 2 and 6 meters, I think we only got about 5 Qs total on 440 in a dozen years, mostly SSB on 144.200-144.275 and 50.125 - 50.300 -- people usually stay close to the national calling frequencies.

Activity usually runs 14:00 to about 20:30 on Saturday and about 07:30 to 14:00 on Sunday. Sunday there are a lot of casual class D & class E users, be ready to know the difference as they may not be sure. Saturday will be most of your available FD VHF/UHF stations with a mix of seek & pounce and calling CQ FD on a frequency - alternate it. There is a bit of CW, not much, you may find some early Sunday say 06:00 to 07:30. Of course, if the bands open all hell will break loose. Don't be shocked with a report of W6ZZZ 2A LAX - yes I've seen it
GL Dan W1DMM

The VHF 2 meter station can be used to send the FD message to the GOTA station for the 100 point bonus (Yup that is legal, we checked it out a few years ago).