Field Day is a great opportunity to get outdoors, gain experience assembling equipment in the rough, and operate a station under challenging band conditions.  This year we operated QRP in the 6A Battery category from Mora Hill in Los Altos, California, overlooking the Silicon Valley from an elevation of 500 feet. 

We had 3 HF CW stations, 2 HF SSB stations, an HF digital station, a Get On The Air (GOTA) station, and a VHF/UHF station with satellite link capabilities.  In spite of being limited to 5 watts, we succeeded in contacting all 50 states as well as Pureto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Sweden.

Our GOTA station was particularly popular with plenty of drop-in visitors including a good number of kids.  In addition to having a great time, each year we work at improving our equipment, antennas and operating skills.  

In order to minimize interference within our site, we took care to have HF transceivers with well-designed front-ends in order to minimize spur transmissions and receiver pumping/de-sensing.   All of our site’s HF stations used Elecraft K3 or KX3 transceivers.  As a result, we experienced almost no mutual interference between our transmitters – even though at times we had four transmitters (CW, Digital, SSB and GOTA) all active on the same band at the same time. We did set up our antennas in a line, all pointed at the East Coast, so the side lobe rejection helped reduce interference. 

Being outdoors also meant that we got to put up wild-n-crazy antennas that our spouses and neighbors might never allow back home.  We used two HF triplexers to simultaneously share a pair of HF tribanders between multiple stations on 10- 15- and 20 meters.  If you’d like to build one for your club, you can learn how to build one in K6KV’s article in the June 2010 issue of QST.  Other antennas at our site included 4-element monobanders on 15- and 20 meters and three rotatable, self-supporting 40m dipoles.  

 Band conditions were fine, although not as great as two years ago.  Sunspots numbers were relatively poor during the weekend at 78, but with stable geomagnetic conditions and  a mid-latitude A-index of 4.  Thanks to the moderately low A-index, D-layer absorption wasn’t bad, and late night conditions on 40- and 80m were pretty good.  20 meters was clearly the sweet spot for FD2014.  Fifteen meters was good, but 10 meters was totally dead.  There was plenty of VHF activity to keep us busy on the 6-, 2- and 70 cm bands – including a 50 MHz contact with Colorado.  And for the second year in a row we made a satellite QSO – not bad for QRP! 

In summary, FD2014 was a real hoot!   Be sure to let us know if you'd be interested in getting involved with our team in 2015.   We tend to be especially short-handed between midnight and 7am.