07/01/2006 | K8DF Stonewall Jackson Amateur Radio Association (SJARA)


The SJARA (K8DF) Field Day activities started on June 24, 2006 with the setting up of shelters and getting antennas ready. The weather man had not given us much encouragement in the good weather area, rain, 50/50 on Saturday and 100% on Sunday.

Everyone started showing up at 9:00 AM on Saturday and the CW station, SSB 20/15/10 meter was installed. A third station was set up to operate SSB on 40/80 meters. Luckily we had no rig or power supply problems like last year.

The Clarksburg Police Department Mobile Command Unit containing the generator arrived around noon and everything was powered up to trouble shoot for power problems. The computers were installed on the three stations but we had learned our lesson from last year not to try wireless, so the logging computers were all hardwired.

We started at 1800 UTC with all of the foreseeable problems solved and Field Day started with exuberance Calling CQ Field Day and logging.

During the day on Saturday as the contacts were being made in great style, visitors and several local dignitaries came by. Mr. Ron Watson, Harrison County Commission, MR.Richard Rock, Executive Director, Harrison County EMS, Mr. Graig Crimm Director of CERT, and Mr. Martin Howe, Clarksburg City Manager. A little later in the day two young lady reporters from WDTV Channel 5 TV, Clarksburg/Weston came by to film the operations and interview the President of SJARA, KB8RIA. The news cast was aired on the WDTV Six oclock news.

Operations ran smoothly during the remainder of Saturday. Also running during Field Day was an APRS station sending out our location, 3916.48N 08020.50W on 144.390 Mhz. Packet Radio was also demonstrated and maintained on 145.690 Mhz, the state wide Digital Amateur Radio Emergency Network (DAREN), which maintains approximately 24 working Nodes, Digipeaters, and PBBS. Recently a new area has been added to the DAREN system and that is the capability of utilizing Winlink/Telpac. Two Telpac gateways have recently been added giving packet via the DAREN nodes the ability to pass text Email seamlessly into the Internet and back to amateurs using DAREN. Each DAREN node maintains a working PBBS to store and pass NTS traffic.

Near midnight we made simplex 2 meter contact with another Field Day station, W8SP, and we managed to exchange SSTV. Just past midnight we attempted a QSO through PCSAT2 running piggyback on the International Space Station but we were unable to receive a QSL even though we did hear a few stations digi via PACSAT2.

The weather did cooperate through Saturday but around 1000 UTC on Sunday it started to rain. Within an hour it had developed into a full scale storm. We received nearly 1 inch of rain in and hour and it was like walking around in 4 inches of soup. With the storm came the downfall of the bands. Things went from bad to worse. About 1400 UTC the main breaker on the generator kicked. We figured water was the problem so we rechecked connections before we restarted the generator. The generator was up and operating but it was decided to terminate operations because it looked like the rain was not going to subside. We terminated Field Day at 1430 UTC. and packed it in until next year.

We seem to improve from year to year, we doubled the contacts of 2005, hope we can double the 2006 contacts in 2007
See you next year, K8DF -- K8TPH