From: wws@craywr.cray.com (Walter Spector)
Subject: Field Day '92
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 27 Jul 92 21:16:49 CDT

Many of us would enjoy hearing about others Field Day activities.
Only a few have been posted to the net so far.  And I'm very interested
in people's perceptions of the band conditions that weekend.
Let's hear more!

Our group (W6YL/N6XVK) headed to a new mountaintop site this year.
Not as high as our old site, but with much more room for antennas.
It also had an excellent view to the east.  We had been up to the site
twice before FD.  Both times there was a light pleasant breeze and it
was quite warm.

The first incident involved the lock on the gate.  We had our
own combination padlock in series with others on the gate.  We had
permission to do so from the owner of the property.  When we arrived
our lock had been cut out!  Fortunately, one of us had a key for one of
the other locks so we were able to get through.  I had to find a
locksmith shop to get a new lock.  No big setback.

There was about two miles of dirt road leading up to the site, some
of it very steep.  We thought it would be easier than our old site
which had 5-6 miles of dirt road.  In fact several cars didn't make
it and had to either turn around or be pulled up.  My XYL's Corolla
made it without any problem (sure am glad she didn't come along.
She would have had a fit!).  One ham punctured his fuel tank and had
to drive home.  Unfortunately he was also the one bringing the food!
(He did return in a truck in remarkably good spirits!)  Together about
18 hams, S.O.s, and kids eventually made it up the hill.

This year we decided to abandon commercial antennas for the main
HF rigs.  It is too much of a pain to take them off people's towers.
It is also painful when they come crashing down accidently, as had
happened to a KLM KT-34 we used last year.  And in the spirit of
FD, it is fun to see what you can do with easily portable stations.

It was an awesome sight seeing several thousand feet of wire and
rope in the air.  We were well prepared to tangle with any Extra-class lids
(or other contest haters) who might try to jam us on 40 or 80m.

About the time we started setting up the antennas, the sky began
to get very cloudy.  The wind came up.  We had set up on a flat spot
between two peaks.  This flat spot seemed to act like a wind
tunnel.  I wish I had brought some sort of wind gauge because it
must have been at least 50 mph!  The antennas survived quite well,
though sometimes they were not quite in the same shape as we had
modeled in NEC.  The really bad part of the wind was the constant
flapping of the tents.  This made headphones mandatory.
Also, being much lower than our old site, we were in the fog at
night instead of above it.  Cold, damp, windy, and no star watching.  :-(

We operated continuously the entire 24-hour period.  I was logging
at the time the earthquake hit.  We were working up and down the
coast on 80m with our eastward pointing antenna (80m never opened for
us to the east coast - our beautiful design for 80 was largely wasted.)
An OM from Southern Cal. asked if we had felt it.  Since we were
literally a mile or two from the Hayward fault, if anyone had felt
it in Northern Cal., we would have.  We worked several more
stations in Southern Cal.  Everyone was comparing notes.  One guy
said he had literally been knocked out of his chair!

It was pretty weird being in the middle of an emergency communications
excercise and having a *real emergency* hit! We did keep tabs on the
quake as a side effect of being on 80m.  But no traffic was forthcoming
from the affected area.  The reports indicated that the epicenter of
the quake was way out in the desert.  So we kept on operating.

The 40m antennas were ruthless.  When the bands were open we had no problems.
No OFs tried to jam us this year (maybe they remember the licking we
gave them last year...  And we had bigger antennas this year,
just in case.  :-)

The phone station was not as effective on 20m as we hoped.  Some signal
reports from the east coast were of the 'strongest sig around' sort,
but many contacts had problems.  I don't think it was due to band
conditions (like last year) because the CW station worked very well.
In fact, the CW station worked far more people on 20m than the phone
station did.  Obviously some 20m antenna work is called for.

But when 15m opened up the last couple of hours, the phone station was
awesome.  We seemed to have total command of the band.  Our QSO rate
was over 110 per hour!  The CW station also did well, but the phone
station really made up for the 20m embarassment by it's performance on 15.

The OSCAR station also did well.  This was the first time our group has
had an OSCAR station, but everyone really had a lot of fun with it.
This despite the fact the the satellite element data that we had was
totally bogus.  It doesn't seem like most people use logging computers
with OSCAR, we didn't either, because when we entered the contacts
we had quite a few dupes.  It's too bad that phone and cw are not
counted seperately on OSCAR - we had dupes between modes as well.

On sunday morning, 10m opened up and the novice station (N6XVK) was
really hopping.  The Novice station worked some CW on 40m.
We also worked several dozen packet stations.

I don't have the final point tally yet, but it is easily in the 7400+ range
for class 2A.  A new all time high for our group.

Oh yeah, the wind died down about 30 minutes after the end.

Walt
-- 
Walt Spector
(wws@renaissance.cray.com)			Queue aRe Zed Field Day
Sunnyvale, California					W6YL
_._ _._ _.... _. ._.
Newsgroups: rec.radio.amateur.misc