07/06/2006 | W3AO The W3AO/KE3Q FD2006 is now history. The Potomac Valley RC and Columbia ARA Field Day effort was a blast; and neither lack of sunspots, nor rain, nor lightning could hold us down! We were very fortunate to have breaks in the rain for setup and tear down, and we only had to stand down for lightning for one 20 minute period on Saturday afternoon. Despite the weather and this being the minimum of the sunspot cycle (SSN was 0 that weekend), our 9,504 QSO total was the highest since 2002! There are not many contests where you can work 9,500 Q's in 23.6 hours! We had over 800 q's in the first hour alone!

This impressive score is truly the result of an incredible team effort. Thanks to CDI Medical, we had two very large, Air conditioned tents and had power from a 25 KVA and a 45 KVA diesel generator. We had 11 Rocket Launcher towers up with monobanders for 40SSB, 40CW, 20SSB, 20CW, 20 Dig, 15CW, 15SSB, 10CW,and 10SSB; plus tribanders for GOTA and digital. We had the following dipoles: 160m, an 80/40 combo for GOTA, separate 40 and separate 80 dipoles for SSB, DIG, and CW. There was a separate tower for VHF/UHF, and yet another tower for Satellites. CT was used to log on 14 computers--networked most of the time, hi.

We were visited by many government officials and officials from served agencies, including the HoCo County Executive, HoCo Fire Chief, Md Delegate from HoCo, and more. Our GOTA team maxed out the new bonus points, and the GOTA ops all reported a super experience working with KE3Q as our GOTA coach! The CARA team worked 7 satellite QSO's, despite loss of computer interface to their tracking antennas during a Saturday afternoon thunderstorm! We were just 3 youth operators (60 pts) short of maxing out all the bonus points. We passed FD traffic with W3HEM, the Historical Electronics Museum FD group, and also did an SSTV demo QSO with them.

So, as the W1AW FD message points out, score isn't the only objective of Field Day--still we are very proud of our 31,244 point total. -- K3RA