07/26/2005 | W0EF W0EF - Twin City FM Club Field Day Report - 2005

This was the second year at our great new Field Day Site in St. Louis Park, MN. What makes it even better is the support we get from the City. Last winter, I received a call from the Park and Rec Director saying "Are you guys going to do your emergency radio thing again this year? We'd love to have you back and would like to write it up in our Park and Recs brochure for the summer. Talk about great PR!

Setup gets easier every year. The guy storing our equipment for the summer even leaves the two 30 towers assembled to save us time on Saturday morning. Assembly of the two Explorer 14 beams went fine and the CW and SSB beam were up in to time.

Because of the windy day, it took us forever to shoot a line over the light tower for the low band antennas. But we finally nailed it and hoisted up the Delta loop. Unfortunately, our trusty Delta Loop literally fell apart and we had to revert to our backup Carolina Windom. This kind of screwed up our antenna layout and we ended up putting our CW and SSB low band antennas way too close together which we paid for a night with intermod between the two stations.

By noon on Saturday, we had our traditional pizza lunch and we were off an running at the bell at 1:00 PM. It seemed like the whole world was on 20 meters and the SSB station had a little trouble finding a clear spot. It will be nice when 15 and 10 are back so things can spread out a little.

We had some some great drop-ins at the GOTA station. Most memorable was Teresa, NS9C who showed up on Saturday wanting to work some CW (you don't see that too often with the GOTA stations!). Under the patience elmering of Don, ND0M and Greg, KC0RET, Tereaa made a lot of CW QSOs using the keyer paddle sideways as a straight key. We also had a couple youngsters show up to make a few CW QSOs.

We had a couple great new ops at our Field Day this year including NN7L and W0OR who had some great runs on CW. W0BV also returned for the 4th year and did a great job at the CW station on Saturday evening.

Floyd, WA0FW did a demonstration of APRS and Tom, N0ZK brought out a solar panel and battery for some more bonus points.

As usual, our Field Day concluded on Sunday with a great picnic (brats and burgers). Overall, our score was about the same as last year mainly because of the intermod problems we had a night on the low bands.



Al, K0AD
Field Day Chairman -- K0AD