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 the West Valley Amateur Radio Association (WVARA) operated QRP in the 9A Battery category from Mora Hill in Los Altos, California, overlooking the Silicon Valley from an elevation of 500 feet.  We had the luxury of lots of solar panels with enough surplus power to run fans in our tents as the temperature on Saturday approached 90 degrees. 

We had a Get-On-The-Air (GOTA) station, three HF CW stations, three HF SSB stations, three HF digital stations, and two VHF/UHF stations including one with satellite link capabilities.  In spite of being limited to 5 watts, we succeeded in contacting all 50 states and a bit of DX.  And there was enough VHF/UHF activity to keep us busy on the 6-, 2- and 70 cm bands including seventeen satellite QSOs.  We managed to make roughly 2000 contacts in 24 hours – not bad for 5 watts!   Our GOTA station (W6ZZZ) was particularly popular with plenty of drop-in visitors including a good number of kids. 

Being outdoors also meant that we got to put up wild-n-crazy antennas that our spouses and neighbors might never allow back home.  Antennas on Mora Hill this year included a pair of 4-band (10/15/20/40) yagi antennas for CW and SSB, and a traditional tribander (with 40m driven element resonator) for the digital tent.   SSB, CW, and Digital each had a triplexer which enabled sharing each yagi between multiple transmitters.  We also had separate 80m dipoles for each mode.  GOTA had a trap vertical, an off-center-fed dipole, and VHF antennas. 

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.   Most of our site’s HF stations used Elecraft or Flex transceivers.  We likewise set up most of our antennas in a line pointed at the East Coast, so the side lobe rejection helped reduce interference. 

Our digital stations benefitted from Bobby’s van which came with a self-contained 30 foot telescoping mast.  In order to minimize interference between the CW and digital stations, we always locate the digital yagi about 200 feet from the rest of the site.  The digital team was able to avoid long runs of coax by installing the digital RF hardware for both of their stations in the van and then running 200 feet of Cat5 Ethernet cable to the main site where the digital tent and the Flex terminals were located. 

While band conditions were less than stellar – especially when compared to what we’ve seen other years.  According to the ARRL’s propagation bulletin, the sola flux during the week of Field Day this year was between 110 and 120 with geomagnetic instability.   Argh!   

Be sure to let us know if you'd be interested in getting involved with our team in 2023.  If you have any questions, you can reach us via CQFieldDay@gmail.com or view our Field Day plans at www.wvara.org.