West Valley Amateur Radio Assoc., San Jose, CA:

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 10A Battery category from Mora Hill in Los Altos, California, overlooking the Silicon Valley from an elevation of 500 feet. 

We had 4 HF CW stations, 4 HF SSB stations, an HF digital station, a Get On The Air (GOTA) station, a satellite station, and two VHF stations.  In spite of being limited to 5 watts, we succeeded in making contacts with 49 states (where was Delaware?) as well as Germany, Japan and Brazil.

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.   This year 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 read all about how to do it in K6KV’s article in the June 2010 issue of QST.

Since we had CW, SSB and PSK-31 stations simultaneously operating on 20 meters, we took care to have HF transceivers with well-designed front-ends in order to minimize spur transmissions and receiver pumping/desensing.   All of our site’s HF stations used Elecraft K3 transceivers.

Being outdoors also meant that we got to put up wild-n-crazy antennas that our spouses and neighbors might never allow back home.  Cool antennas at our site this year included three rotatable, self-supporting 40m dipoles.  We also made good use from 4-element monobanders on 15- and 20 meters.   We appear to have handily beat our score from 2011.

- Jim, K6EI