Field Day: Results

While conditions were terrible…still. I did manage to work some contacts on 2M, 10M, 15M and 20M yesterday. I really had no intentions to put forth much of an effort. As I have written in the past, Field Day does not really get me excited like it does other operators. I love what the event stands for, but really no desire to participate.

I did leave work yesterday around 21z and since I did not have the ATAS-120A installed on the truck decided to use the 2m/440cm antenna and see if I could make any 2M SSB contacts. As luck would have it, I was successful! ON my drive from Oakland to Oakley I made three contacts, WW6OR, WA6TOW and K6XN. I did hear K6LRG and N9JIM as well, but did have a QSO with either of them.

When I got into the shack, I hooked up the extension cord to the Honda generator and fired it up and went to 20M. Strangely enough, I did not even bother with SSB, moving to the CW portion of the band. Not surprising the band was FULL of signals at varying WPM rates. I decided on about 25 WPM and started working stations in all categories. For the most part many signals were good, I did have a few that were tough to copy and required a repeat.

After getting through the CW portion of the band I punched in 14.150 and changes to SSB. Wow! Conditions were bad to begin with, it was noisy and many signals were just above the noise level. Signals on top of signals or so it seemed. I did not last long in SSB. I decided to check 10M and 15M, but only made a single contact on each. I decided to forget about working SSB stations and went back to CW for about another 30 minutes.

In total I worked  about 90 total minutes. As I mentioned yesterday I did not plan on putting in more than about an hour. In that time I worked 16 states and 24 counties. I had 2 QSOs on 2M, 1 on 10M, 2 on 15M and 22 on 20M. Of those QSOs only 5 were SSB contacts the rest were CW.