ARRL Field Day - 2020
Call: AA4LR
Operator(s): AA4LR
Station: AA4LR
Class: 1D LP
QTH: Georgia
Operating Time (hrs): 7
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Dig Qs
----------------------------
160:
80: 9
40: 93 1
20: 116 25
15: 30 11
10: 22 3
6:
2:
222:
432:
903:
1.2:
2.3:
3.4:
5.7:
10G:
24G:
----------------------------
Total: 270 40 0 Total Score = 1,160
Club: South East Contest Club
Comments:
Antennas:
80/40/20m Trap Dipole at 25 feet
160/80/40m Inverted J with two radials
HF4B at 10 feet
Equipment:
Elecraft K2/100 with KAT100 running 100 watts
K1KP-style voice keyer (1 message)
WKSerial
Yamaha CM500
Comments:
2020 will certainly go down as the most at-home version of Field Day. I lost
track of how many D and E stations I worked.
This was a casual operation just handing out some Qs from Fulton County.
I had originally brought a Deep-Cycle battery to Fulton County in order to run
1E, but for some reason, I couldn't power the K2 from the battery. I'm still
trying to figure that one out.
The 80/40/20m trap antenna was one that I built a few days prior in Gwinnett
county, then moved it to the Fulton country QTH. It's resonant on 20m and 80m,
but 40m still needs a bit of pruning, as it is resonantly about 6.8 MHz.
Nevertheless, with a tuner, it worked fine. With all the leaves on the trees, I
couldn't really hoist it up to a reasonable height. Even so low, it worked
pretty well.
HF4B is too low to be useful. I rebuilt that antenna from the parts that an
ex-Ham friend gave it me. She used it for about five years, moved, and the
antenna sat outside next to her house for about 20 years. Once I figure out a
good way to mount it, it should be a fine performer.
Things went well Saturday afternoon, 10m and 15m opened nicely. Using the trap
dipole I was able to run nicely on 20m. I was about to shift to 40m when I ran
into a problem. RFI was causing the WinKeyer to mis-key. I went back to 20m for
about an hour when I remembered that grounding the computer to the station
ground generally fixes that problem. By then, 40m phone was too crowded, so I
settled in to work some CW. The trap dipole worked pretty well on 40m as well.
The trap dipole was a real worm-burner on 80m, I didn't have too much success
there before I turned in with about 280 Qs.
Was up early in the morning, so figured I'd work 80 and 40m for an hour.
Unfortunately, the K2 gave me the dreaded INFO 080 error. It does this to me
occasionally. Usually, it clears after the K2 warms up. After about 20 minutes
of being on, the K2 acted normally again. Unfortunately, the WinKeyer Serial
wasn't working.
After about an hour of fooling with it, my time was up and I had to get ready
for church. This was our first in-person, socially-distanced service since
closing in March. After Church, I fooled with it some more, and finally gave up
opting to take the WKSerial out entirely, and using an old serial port keying
adapter. That worked great and I managed a few more Qs.
All in all a lot of fun. The trap dipole will need to be pruned some more and
elevated to a better height. And I need to address these other failures as well.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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