EPA QRP Club
Field Day 2002
Hi Gang,
EPA QRP Field Day was very good this year. It was held at Len's N2BSC
place and we enjoyed FD 2002 with some of the comforts not found in previous
years. Len was our chef for the weekend and delighted out taste buds with
great food. Thank you Len, the cooking was great and the hospitality
wonderful.
We had six ham's in attendance and operated from 18:30 Saturday until 18:00
Sunday. We logged about 161 SSB and 219 CW contacts. We used NA for our
logging software and it was easy to learn. Our operators were N2BSC,
WB3GCK, K3NG, N3ZIL & N3GWR. It was a casual operation with down time
for sleeping, eating and enjoying getting together. A K-1 was used for the
CW station most of the time and feed a 40 meter inverted V antenna feed with
twin lead. Several other rigs were also used for CW. The SSB station
consisted of a K-2 feeding an 80 meter doublet. Contacts were made on the
160, 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meter bands and this included some DX stations.
I would definitely give EPA-QRP Field Day 2002 a 2+ thumbs up rating.
Take care and 72,
Jon N3ZIL
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I would have to second Jon's
"2+ thumbs up" rating for Field Day this year. I had a ball and,
given the heat, it was nice to be able to escape into the air conditioned house
from time to time.
With practically no advanced planning, we had to use some real creativity to get
up and running. For the CW station, for example, we cobbled together a
24-foot mast from a variety of parts, which included the PVC pipe base section
from the homebrew vertical I use on my camper, a couple of tent poles from Len,
and a Black Widow fishing rod. (Always remember... Spare the duct tape,
spoil the project!) This was used to support a lightweight 40M doublet fed
with 300-ohm ladder line and TV twin lead and tuned with a homebrew Z-match
tuner. We also had to quickly load the software and configure 2 laptops
for logging, which also worked out great. Goody and I opted to not key the
CW rig from the laptop. So, our fists got quite a workout over the
weekend.
Jon's venerable 80-meter Field Day doublet and his K2 did a heck of a job for
the SSB station. (Last night I swore I heard Jon's voice saying "TWO
ALPHA TWO ALPHA IN EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA" over and over in my sleep!)
:-) Amazingly, the SSB station ran the whole weekend on the same 7-AH gel
cell without re-charging.
I also want to thank Len for his outstanding food and hospitality. It was a
great weekend and I'm already looking forward to next year.
So, here's my "thumbs up" for the EPA-QRP 2002 Field Day!
73, Craig WB3GCK
