07/04/2006 | K4TDP The 550 DX Club setup for the fifth year in a row using our club call, K4TDP. In the spirit of the contest we again setup in the field of AB4DN. Our participants this year were KE4YNY, AC0CL, K4RVH, KU4J, AB4DN, and KD4BJW (picture 1). We had 6 visitors come by our site to check things out and this year we were able to get two of them on the air.

In the second picture you will see one of our visitors operating the 6m station. Her name is Jill Whitehouse. She sat down with KD4BJW as control op (who stepped back for the pictures) and not only operated, but ran the frequency for a while before the band closed. She was able to ring in 17 contacts. Way to go Jill.

In the third and fourth pictures you will see the second guest whom we were able to get on the air, Dawson Amos. This young man was eager to get on the air. He had his mom drive him almost 25 miles to our location so he could get on the radio. He turned 4 in March so it looks like we may have us a new generation radio enthusiast growing-up around us. Dawson, says that he is looking forward to getting his license and his own radio as soon as he learns to read. We expect that he will be doing more on the air over the next year and hopefully will join us again next year for a few contacts.

Brent, KE4YNY who had a new radio last year, but has not yet upgraded was eager to get another chance to work with it. Brent still plans on getting his general and extra class license so that he can fly solo from his home QTH with this really nice Kenwood 480SAT.

Jesse, AC0CL has been working with us for the past 4 Field Days. He has upgraded since we started from no license to an extra class operator. Jesse is just short of 15 years of age and is quite the CW enthusiast. Jesse made 229 contacts this year mostly on 40 and 20 meter CW. We are all very proud of his accomplishments and look forward to him helping us out again next year.

Last year K4RVH was not able to attend field day so he was looking forward to getting out and stretching his legs and some antenna wire. He brought our operating tent and a station for us to use. Vic had upgraded his equipment to include a battery booster, a powergate, and a yellow top optima battery. He has a really nice setup with the 706 and accessories.

KU4J, AB4DN, and KD4BJW are regulars with this group and once again came to lend support in raising antennas and operating. Tim, KU4J was the mainstay of our contacts (mostly 40m CW). AB4DN chose again this year not to operate, but provided the field, food and great hospitality for the group. KD4BJW mostly provided logistics and aided in control-op for the GOTA station and manned the 6m station at times.

For radios this year we had the previously mentioned 480SAT, a FT-100MV Field, and two ICOM 706s. We were able to use Dunestar bandpass filters for two stations and an ICE 419B bandpass filter for the GOTA. We still need to improve filtering next year by having a stub filter for the 6m station to aid in keeping down interference.

For operating positions we used laptop computers running Writelog, wireless networking, K1EL Winkeys for auto CW, and homebrew sound card interfaces for RTTY.

This year we decided to attempt to use a solar power charged battery. We were a little worried about its operation with the cloud cover that we had this year, but it worked well. The solar panel we used is only a 5W output at around 13.5V. It charged a 12V 12 A/hr battery for us to use. We connected this battery after it had charged for several hours to K4RVH's 706 setup. He had the battery booster ready to go so we plugged in and made about 9 contacts running full power. This proves the concept that we can make contacts using solar power, but we realize that we would need more batteries and should try to operate at reduced power if we were going to run for very long.

We continued with antennas that we had used in the past, this year. The only change this year was a new hub for the 20m moxon. This hub was much lighter than the one we used last year, which made putting it up much easier. We used a 75m dipole tuned for 3.850 MHz at about 32 feet as a NVIS antenna. This antenna worked really well for checking into our section traffic net and making 15m contacts. We used a W5GI mystery antenna for a multi-band antenna. Then we had some good performing antennas that we have continued to use over the years: A 2-element homebrew quad on 6m, which yielded 177 non-dupe contacts this year and a Battlecreek special 40, 80, and 160m vertical.

Over all our performance this year was good considering we had to shut down our operation for about an hour and a half due to a thunderstorm. We also got more sleep this year than most times before. Our setup seemed to still be fairly slow, but our take down this year went pretty smooth. Disappointingly we did not make as many contacts as we have in the past. All in all, I think we have continued to increase our ability to operate efficiently, quickly, and without the need for commercial power. We plan again next year to continue our efforts in gaining experience and operating efficiently. 73 -- KD4BJW -- KD4BJW