07/02/2004 | K3MJW Last year's Field Day was great, but this year was better. We operated from our new pavilion on our clubhouse grounds. For antennas we used a 40/80 meter dipole, a 3 element tri-band beam on just 20 foot of tower, a multi-band vertical, and a Weather balloon vertical long wire! The balloon worked great. It was the first time we tried this. After talking to some knowledgeable people we were going to build a LC network for the base to dissipate the static from wind on the wire and a cap to couple the RF. Well, we should have built this BEFORE Field Day. We landed up just hooking the wire to the tuner and the other to ground through the balun in the tuner. It worked GREAT! We had about 150 feet of wire up and we kicked butt on 80 with it. We had a nice bonfire going all night and everything was perfect. The bands were open and we had enough operators. Some Field Day first timers too!

For power we used our BFB. Big Fat Battery with all power distributed with PowerPoles. Made everything easy. With four radios running full time we only got down to 12.1 volts. Love that ol' battery. Much quieter that the generator...

For food we made a classic Italian dinner with Rigatonis, tomato sauce with lots of garlic and onions, garlic bread, sharp ground cheese, and red wine. We don't mess around... There were also peppers stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped in bacon. Wow! Hot dogs and hamburgers and all the fixins! Isn't Field Day great?

We got two articles in two local news papers complete with pictures and quite a few visitors including the Red Cross lady, Marge. We had four ops sleep overnight and had eggs and bacon with Italian toast, rounded out with fresh ground coffee. Everyone had a really good time and we all are looking forward to next year. Not sure how we can top this one. Hmmmm.

More info on www.skyviewradio.net -- WC3O