Things No One Else Will Tell You About Field Day

I'm nostalgic. I like traditions. I like to camp. I like to stay up all night from time to time. I like to play on the radio--but you knew that already. So, it makes sense that I would like the ARRL's Annual Field Day. In fact, since becoming a ham I haven't missed one yet. Okay, that's not really a major feat, as I've only been licensed during the past four Field Days, but I am on a roll that I hope to keep going. So like many other amateur radio operators, I've marked June 28-29 on the calendar and informed the XYL of my intentions to operate the, "entire weekend this year. " 

In case you're wondering: she rolled her eyes and gave me her best "whatever" look before informing me that I would have three children as company and that she would be happy to be left alone in the house for, "the entire weekend." She said it very menacingly.

If you've never partaken of the Field Day festivities, there is plenty of literature available online and in print. The books and website will give you the basics: what the point is, who might be on the air, what you'll be hearing, where to go, what t-shirt to buy, how many commemorative mugs you should consider parting with your dollars for...but there are a few things they don't tell you. For instance:

Field Day IS a contest

They will say it isn't. They will assure you that it's a test. They will tell you there is no winner. They are all liars! Of course it's a contest, but the points are a little tricky to calculate, so here is a handy guide to calculate your score.

Field Day 2014 Ham-N-Roll Point System
Visible Insect Bites	1 Pt./Ea
Antenna Rope Burns	1Pt./Inch
Hair Physically Torn Out During FD	10Pts./Square Inch
Caffinated Beverages Consumed	1 Pt./8 oz.
Pens/Pencils Rendered Useless	2 Pt./Ea.
Sleep	-25 Pts./Hour
Speaking to Non-Hams about Event	10 Pts./Minute
New Friends Made	Priceless
Multipliers:
Sunburn	Percentage of body covered expressed as a whole number i.e. 50% of body Sunburned=50 x total points
Lost Voice	Multiply points by db SPL lost from June 28 at 1800 UTC to June 29 at 2059 UTC

Field Day is a GREAT Weekend for DX

Sure the bands will be crowded, sure people will be piled up like I-5 during rush hour moments after an armored truck rolled over spilling it's contents across 8 lanes of asphalt. It also means that just about everyone in the world with na HF rig will be pointing their antenna stateside to witness the madness. If you're anything like me, you'll find those little RF holes in the spectrum and call CQDX a few times, you might be surprised at who answers. Last year, I added 7 new countries. 

You Don't Need an HF Rig to Enjoy Field Day

There are a few ways around the lack of a HF rig in your shack. You can join a club or group who is participating and use their gear at a GOTA (get on the air) station--find a group here. You can find a friend who has an HF rig and beg, borrow, or steal it for the weekend (I do not advise the latter, the fines and jail time will really hamper your chances at DXCC). Or you can take you FM mobile or hand-held out to the highest geographic location within a reasonable distance and score some major fun working simplex. If you decide to go that route, take a few minutes and a few dollars (<$20) to build a tape measure yagi and double your distance. Here is a link to some great plans for one.

Even if You Are Set Up on the Moon Bring Bug Spray

Field Day's one draw back is that it is always concurrently scheduled with the annual AMFGNEAH festival. The AMFGNEAH (Annual Mosquito Fly Gnat and Noseeum Eat A Ham) Festival is notorious. Google it. Never mind the robots must be sleeping, there are no results. Seriously though, you would be amazed at how many Field Day points (see the chart above) you'll acquire if you ignore this little tidbit: Bug Spray=Good, Mosquito Coils=Good, Sugar water=No Bueno. 

37% of Field Day Happens at Night

Field Day is twenty seven hours long, ten of those hours are in darkness, unless you live in Alaska or you are operating inside a building (which, for the record, is not a Field and therefore cheating...regardless of what the rules say). No one remembered to tell me this the first year, so imagine my surprise when I was trying to test my battery voltage at three in the morning without a flashlight. Luckily the arch of electricity alerted a fellow ham that I needed some light...and an icepack. Make sure you have some means of seeing after dark, I prefer an LED headlamp. It leaves my hands open and reduces shadows where I need to see. Also, it's easier to find after thirty cups of coffee and eight hours of breathing bug spray fumes.

In Conclusion

Field Day is a blast and the stories I have from my first four are some of my favorite Ham moments. If I could only impart one thing, it would be this: enjoy your time. No matter how many or how few contacts you make Field Day is always interesting, challenging, and usually a lot of fun. Take time to work stations having trouble, go out of your way to chat up younger hams. Be ready with a smile and plenty of charm when someone stops by to see what all the racket is about. Field Day is a blast, but only if you make it one.

Quick and Dirty Field Day Doublet

Last night I got home with a few hours of daylight to spare (thank you very much Summer Solstice) so I decided to throw a quick and dirty doublet together for Field Day. Like most hams, I have a few (unless you ask my XYL, then it's hundreds) boxes of random "junk" laying around that I use from time to time to experiment, so I pulled out a few bits and pieces to put the antenna together. In case you've never built a doublet, here are my reasons for doing so and the theories that I employed.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding the terms "doublet" and "dipole," so let me wade into the murky waters and explain the difference as I see it. Technically, there is none. They are two names for the same thing. However, the difference, in common parlance, lies in how you feed said antenna and whether the antenna is cut to resonance for a target frequency. 

Typically, a "dipole" is a resonant antenna for a given frequency and is fed with coax. There are many purveyors of 40 meter, 20 meter, 10 meter, etc. dipoles that include a PL259 connection at the center connector to attach your coax. These dipoles are typically resonant near the center of the given bad and give adequate bad with to allow the ham to operate anywhere on the bad without the need for a tuner. Try to load them up on another band then their design frequency however, and noise, smoke, silence, and cursing often occur. 

"But I have a fancy built-in tuner in my rig, so I can load that 40-meter dipole up on 6 through 160, right?" 

Maybe, but the impedances of other bad on a resonant dipole can be amazingly high. So, in short, it's not a good idea to test fate. There are however tuners that will allow you to load up on other bands, but the signal losses of doing so offer drastically diminishing returns. In other words, you might be able to tune that 40-meter dipole up on 160-meters, but it might work as well as loading up a Soup Can. 

A Doublet (again, I'm speaking of "Doublet" as is generally understood. Both "dipole" and "doublet" mean the same thing), is a little different. The basics are the same. You generally cut a doublet antenna to be a half wave long on the lowest frequency you plan to operate. Impedances on other bands will still be amazingly high, but the losses will be much lower and turn our "Soup-Can" into a usable, although compromised, antenna. How? I'm glad you asked.

By using ladder line or open wire feed-line (two wires separated by spacers) the signal losses are dramatically reduced. The ladder line is then fed into a Balanced Line Tuner (or a 4:1 Balun) and then coax to your rig. A Balanced Line Tuner like the CG Antenna Ltd. Remote Auto Tuner is placed where your ladder line meets the ground and powered by a battery (in my case an SLA battery which is charge by a 5W Solar Panel (Pics coming soon) or by a "Bias Tee Power Injector" such as the MFJ-4116. When the auto tuner senses RF energy it quickly measures the SWR and makes the necessary adjustments to put it back in a usable range. Remote auto tuners like the CG can seamlessly deal with the wild impedance differences between bands and allow you to operate on 6 -meters one minute and 40-meters the next. So now you can pick a Saturday and knock out that DXCC you were thinking about getting someday. Maybe, but there are a few other things to consider.

Our 40-meter Doublet and subsequent Balanced Line Auto Tuner are doing their job singingly, but it is important to realize exactly what they are doing. Like a 40-meter resonant dipole, our antenna will project the bulk of it's RF energy 90° to the antenna in both directions, in other words, off the sides of the antenna. This is assuming that the antenna is flat-top and at least 1/4 wave (33 feet or so) above the ground. When we move dow to 20-meters, our antenna will still put the bulk of it's energy out at 90°, but as we go higher in frequency (17-meter, 15-Meter, 12-Meter, etc.) our two predictable lobes will start to break up and lose energy. by 15-meters, there will essentially be 4 lobes at 45° each. I wish I had the ability to plot this out for you, but at the moment I don't. Suffice it to say, that you must consider the trade-offs when ever you deploy a multi-band antenna. 

Wow, that was  a lot of theory to get to my application. So, I decided to deploy a lightweight 66' (half wave on 40-meter) doublet fed with 300Ω Ladder Line. I built this antenna to use for Field Day 2013, but it will also be used regularly when operating portable with my Hendricks PFR-3. That being the case, I wanted it to be pretty bullet-proof without adding too much weight. Also, I wanted to save the nice 500' spool of antenna wire I have to complete an 80-meter full-wave loop this summer. Luckily, my fellow Ham and father recently unloaded a spool of hefty speaker wire on me.

I found this Wireman 814C in a box and drilled the holes a little wider to accommodate the wire. I soldered everything up, added some shrink-wrap (in case it stays up longer than planed) and put it away for the weekend. 

As you might notice, I need to buy a heat gun as my lighter really charred the shrink wrap, but at least it's still functional. I'll report back on how the antenna performs, but in the meantime, I hope I've given you some food-for-thought on dipoles vs. doublets.

Field Day Approaches

Field Day is NEXT WEEKEND! Wow, that came fast. It feels like yesterday that I was bemoaning the fact that I had to work the entire weekend of FD2012. This year, I don't and I've been preparing my family for my absence long enough now that they roll their eyes when I continue to remind them. So I'm in full planning mode.

I was hoping to run QRP CW as a 1B station this year, but I've been slacking a little in the learning department and my CW is still way too shaky to commit to an entire weekend of CW only. I will still try to gather a few CW contacts with patient ops, probably in the wee hours of the morning when the pile-ups are few and far between and less people will be listening to my shaky fist. For the most part, I'll be operating SSB. 

I've thought long and hard about where to celebrate this year's festivities, but my equipment is weighing down (literally) my options. Because I will be working SSB, I only have a full size 100W rig available. While I have no problem losing the computer and paper logging (see THIS post), my transceiver alone will draw more power than I can easily carry. Since my house is 100% solar powered during the day, I may operate from the QTH and utilize a bank of AGM batteries I have stashed for just such an occasion. That feels a little boring though. Maybe I'll set up a tent and "camp out" for the weekend. I have 9 acres to spread out in and plenty of trees to test out some quick and dirty antenna deployment options. Who knows?

It's times like this where I really miss being a part of a club. I still have had zero luck getting in touch with anyone listed on the ARRL club list for Northern NJ. I'm hoping to wrap up my mobile install tonight, so I can start monitoring the local repeaters and maybe find a few other like-minded hams to steer me in the right direction, or to start a new club with. Until then, I need to get ready for next weekend. 

What are your plans for Field Day?