07/01/2007 | W0DK The Boulder Amateur Radio Club (BARC) http://www.qsl.net/w0dk/ held its annual 2A Field Day operation using the club callsign, WK for the third year in a row up at Betasso Preserve just west of Boulder, Colorado on a beautiful mountain Field Day site at about 6,600'. Our hard-working and well-organized Field Day Chairman, John Reilly, WFR, coordinated this event again.

The Betasso Preserve lies within the northeast corner of the Colorado Mineral Belt, in an area surrounded by abandoned gold and tungsten mines. Here wildlife abounds. Chances of sighting Mule Deer, Elk, Black Bear, Mountain Lions, Coyotes and Gray Fox is very good. Last year we had a pesky Gray Fox hanging around. This year we saw a Mule Deer and a small Black Bear near our site.

The weather couldnt have been more perfect this year. A first!!! Usually we are cringing in our shelter from thunder, lightning and hailstorms during Field Day. We had out tarps in place and ready just in case. Thankfully, they were never needed except to provide some welcome shade from the warm sun. The temperatures in the Boulder Valley just below us rose to over 95 degrees but just being another 1500 above the Valley floor cooled the temps to a very tolerable 78 degrees at our mountain QTH. It just doesnt get much better than that!

The Boulder Amateur Radio Club has seen a very good increase in its membership during the past year primarily due to the hard work of our BARC VEs and ham radio class Elmers who actively recruit these newly licensed hams. Because of this, we expected this year to have increased interest and participation on Field Day. Many of these newly licensed hams had told us they have never operated on HF and were looking forward to participating on Field Day to get some experience with antennas, towers, HF radios, CW and SSB, etc..

The core group of the BARC Field Day participants is made up of 10 club members (some new, some old) who organize the BARC Field Day and set up the stations and antennas. They acquire and bring up the mountain all of those necessary items that are needed on site. This year we had an additional 24 hams and/or visitors show up to operate or just look around at the stations and socialize during the event. Our very active Colorado Section Manager, Jeff Ryan, KM pitched in early in the morning (again) and helped us get the antennas set up before leaving to make his 'Grande Tour' of the other Field Day sites up and down the Front Range of the Rockies.

This year we added a GOTA station that used my callsign, WM and I volunteered to mentor that station during Field Day. That station used BARCs TS-480SAT and it was connected to a multiband dipole at 40. I dont know who was more thrilled with the QSOs on that station. Whether it was the operators who made their first ever contact on HF, or myself, having helped them through the procedure and being part of their first experience. All I know is that we were all having great fun. It was particularly gratifying to assist two young boys, Wesley and Harrison Sanders (no calls yet!) ages 7 and 9 to make their very first ham radio contacts. Their faces told it all. Even in this day of cell phones and the internet, the sound of someone that you called CQ for coming back to you through a loudspeaker is still exciting to young and old alike. The patience shown and the comments from the hams that answered the CQ Field Day from these two young lads was outstanding. Those hams they worked are to be commended for taking the time to work and talk to these young, prospective hams in the manner they did during the otherwise frenzied pace of Field Day QSOs. I want to thank the operators at KQ and KG7RS for doing just that. You both are great ambassadors for our hobby.

Tommy Thompson, WVJ, built the well-engineered and constructed base-hinged 40 tower assembly. The attached SteppIR 3-element beam went up incredibly smooth again on the clever sliding pulley assembly and the beam was soon clear of the tall trees around it. Next to go up was the tried and true Zepp antenna fed with 450 ohm balanced line to the venerable Johnson Matchbox tuner and connected to an equally seasoned Ten-Tec Corsair II that was recently donated to BARC by one of its oldest and most esteemed member hams, Dick Silberstein, WBF who is 101 years old! We had decided last year to utilize less menu driven radios on Field Day and the Corsair played well as our CW position. A brand-spanking new Ten-Tec Omni VII lent to us by one of our newest members, Chester Pauns was used on the SSB station this year. This SSB station coupled to our antenna arrays netted us nearly a 1000 contacts on HF.

This year Tommy wanted to provide us with an easier way to switch the Zepp and SteppIR antennas between the SSB and the CW stations. He came up with a clever patch cord array that was simple and easy to use, even in the darkest of night. A linear array of ground rods, similar to what the US Army uses in Iraq, provided station ground and kept a lot of noise from getting to our radios. This was an improvement brought to us from another member, Ed Gansen, NAD who thought our station would benefit from that sort of ground system as we have very sandy soil and lossy ground at these altitudes in Colorado.

The dipole and Zepp were strung up in the tall pine trees with the traditional well-aimed slingshot/fishing reel combo catapulting their fine lines over tall tree limbs and the heavier antenna lines were brought up behind them. We got the dipole strung up to about 40 high and oriented it east/west. The Zepp was a bit higher at about 45 and also broadsided east/west. Both antennas played extremely well throughout the event.

Generator power this year was provided by a 5kw power plant located about 75 away from the site. Another new member, Ueli Hauser, KB9TTI/HB9TTI, provided this generator and a back-up 5kw generator was on standby provided to us by Willard Crary, NWZ. The generator worked flawlessly throughout Field Day and AC power was never a problem.

This year we also added the N3JFP Network Logging program to our laptop computers coupled to a local wireless access point. It worked great. This also made the after Field Day scoring a snap as well.
Everything was set and ready before the 1800 UTC start time and we checked and rechecked our equipment installations, antenna SWR and station grounding systems.

Once the Field Day event was on, we found that we could easily hold a frequency with either of our stations and were getting many reports of boy, you guys are loud! This held true, especially on the SteppIR beam throughout the Field Day operation. The switching 180-degree feature on the SteppIR beam worked great and allowed us to work the east and west coast with just a flick of the switch. Heck, with this antenna youre really operating a monobander on each band! The SteppIR has enough Front to Back gain that the usually interfering Big Guns from the Left Coast were hardly noticeable when we were pointing east. And, when we needed to run the west coast, we did it just by flipping the directional switching towards them. A welcome surprise for a few hours early Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday late morning until Field Day end was two excellent 15-meter band openings. During these times our QSO rate was around 200 QSOs/hour! The workhorse bands though were 20M and 40M, as usual.

A lot of the newly licensed ham members contributed to this years successful Field Day for BARC. I think the Rookie of the Year Award should go to Ken Long, NO for a really energetic and untiring effort on the SSB station. He became a seasoned contester early on and was, in fact, helpful in every facet of this total Field Day effort. He looked like he had been doing this all of his life!

During the Field Day event some DX stations called us and told us we were very loud (S9+10) including a SM station in Sweden, a couple of G stations in the UK and a ZL station in New Zealand.

Don Nelson, NE, veteran VHF/UHF contester provided VHF/UHF communications and QSOs. Don worked nice 6M openings around the country during the day as well as working many 2M, 1.25M, 70cm Field Day stations around the area on his Moxon arrays. He even added a couple of additional contacts on 10GHz!

Dale Scott, KAPV our ARES District 11 Assistant EC, set up a portable packet node and passed some NTS traffic for us. Packet is a very useful communication mode for us to utilize whenever we have to work on a wildfire. Packet is utilized to handle fire logistics for our served agency. It is always good practice to see what it will take to get the VHF packet signals out of these mountains to other packet nodes along the mountains and eastern plains. Some of the largest wildfires we have been on in the recent past were located within a mile of this present Field Day site. Field Day provides us a chance to practice under typical terrain conditions (minus the fire!).

Saturday evening, BARC VP and "Grand Chef", Gary Carroll, WN, skillfully prepared a sumptuous BBQ dinner with all the fixings. Sunday morning he prepared us all perfectly made to order bacon and eggs and hot coffee. Many delectable pastries were provided on both days by another new ham, Joan Hauser, KCUZ/HB9TYY. This was Joans first ever experience at Field Day and she was more than up to the task. Joan even provided a birthday cake to celebrate her OMs (Ueli, KB9TTI/HB9TTI) and my 65th birthday which both fell during Field Day. The beautiful cake was complete with an antenna tower designed with frosting and our age (mercifully) emblazoned in Morse code for only the few to decipher. We would have needed a "Burn Permit" from the County in order to light that amount of candles out here in the woods, so we opted to forego that custom.

One of our goals this year was to improve on the number of CW contacts over last year. This we did. Last year we had 231 CW contacts and this year we acumulated 569 contacts on CW. Our overall Field Day score was up by about 33% over last year.

Because this location is on a very well used mountain-hiking trail we have lots of visitors stopping by to see what we are up to. All of our club members took a turn to help explain to these hikers and bikers what we were doing, how, and moreover.. why? We had some ARRL supplied brochures on ham radio and these very interested visitors eagerly took copies to peruse later. On Sunday, a few of them stayed around to watch us take down our tower and beam (I think they were taking bets on whether or not it would crash to the ground). But just as we had planned, it came down as safely as it had gone up the day before. What had taken over 3 hours to erect came down in less than 45 minutes! We were all packed, the site cleaned and gone within 90 minutes after Field Day ended. A somewhat tired, but happy group. We begin the planning process for Field Day 2008 next month!
73 DE JACK -- WM