07/10/2008 | KC8EO Field Day 2008 has come and gone and what a GREAT time we had this year. The Northwest Harris County ARES and Waller County ARES groups got together out at the Rafter M Ranch located in Hockley, Texas and held their Field Day as a combined group. This was our second year to do so.

We had a Boy Scout troop come out and join us and worked on their "Radio Merit" badge and had a great time. Members from both ARES group pitched in and help the scouts work on their merit badge by learning the requirements for the badge. Each boy was able to make a contact or two on the GOTA station and I think we obtain a least two new hams out of the scout group.

We worked as a 3A STX (KC8EO) station this year. We all had a lot of fun deploying our stations, antennas, workstations, and the most important item the BBQ pit. I'm not sure that we burned up the airways this year, but we defiantly didnt burn the BBQ briskets, ham, trail ride potatoes, and baked beans. As we all said we might not made the most QSOs, BUT no ate better than we did. We had three RVs and two tent campers that stayed the entire weekend and kept the station running until around 1:30 AM Saturday night. Now if we can just find a generator that will run on H2O and not gasoline that will make it less painful to feed them.

To help with antenna separation this year we set up two of our station sites apart from each other. We had the two SSB stations located at site #3 and the digital/CW and 6-meter station at site #1. The GOTA station site #2 was placed in between them which is were you found most of the scouts and guests activity.

We had somewhere between 45 and 55 hams and non-hams attended the field day event this year and all had a good time. We had demonstration in PSK-31, what makes up a simple radio, and simple electronics. One of the antennas that we did this year that I really enjoyed was to deploy a full wave 160-meter balloon antenna. Joe (AF4XG) used a 4-foot weather balloon to hoist it up in the air. As the day went on and the wind got a little stronger, we deployed a 9-foot wing span kite that kept the antenna almost overhead. Talk about ears HIGH in the sky!

We had one family that had the most mature ham and the youngest licensed ham at field day. Alice (AI4K) drove all the way from Florida to join us for Field day in Texas. Their daughter Sarah (N4DDK) was the youngest license ham at our field day event.

I hope that other groups had as much fun this year as we did on field day. We are already starting to plan and looking forward to field day 2009.

73,
Ken Miller
EC Waller County -- W5KAM