Winter Field Day 2022

By: noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Mannion)

1 February 2022 at 04:06

Yours truly participating in Winter Field Day. (Photo: N3JEC)

I've participated in the ARRL's Field Day for the past couple of years, but never Winter Field Day until this past weekend.

Held at Nockamixon State Park in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, this Winter Field Day operation was done under the aegis of the Young Amateurs Radio Club (YARC) of which I am a member, and was overseen by Charlie, K3NOP who coordinated the whole event.

I left Massachusetts Friday morning and after a 5 hour drive, arrived in the late afternoon at the park. I helped to set up antennas as soon as I arrived. While the even didn't start till 2pm EDT the next day, I got up at 2am after failing to fall asleep and was joined by N3JEC with our respective FT-991As and started playing radio early.

W1PAC and N3JEC playing radio at 2am in the morning.

The next day the contest got underway and we were off and running doing digital and voice as a 4 India station. At some points we had 3 operators at operating at the same time. There were also technical glitches at times, such as stepping on each other when transmitting resulting in one or multiple radios getting a lot of noise on HF.

Also, we weren't the only hams in the park, it turns out, that another group was at the other end of the cabin area playing around. We happened by chance upon them when we heard my Anytone 868 which had one of the VFOs set to 146.52 simplex and heard someone calling out! We invited them down to check out our cabin at some point, which they did. We also invited other Philly areas hams to join us of which only a few did, mostly because of the snowstorm (which was a blizzard here back in Massachusetts) left the roads a little less to be desired.

Not only did we have radios operating, but we held a Volunteer Examiner session that anyone could attend. We had at least one person upgrade to Extra! Congrats KC3SAI!

Anyways, I had an awesome time, and I hope to do it again next year! Here's the list of operators:

K3NOP, Charlie
WX0A, Amelia
N3JEC, Johnathan
W1PAC, Patrick
KC3SAI, Sean

Also in attendance and a great help were:

AJ3DI, Jim
K3CL, Charlie
W4KEK, Grant
N1LC, Lamonte
W4GMN, Dan

Lastly, YARC had a claimed score of 4,020. Let's see what the final results say!

Scanning the Airwaves
Field Day
3 July 2018 at 14:52

Field Day

Scanning the Airwaves

By: noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Mannion)

3 July 2018 at 14:52

From Saturday June 23 to Sunday June 24, I participated in my very first ARRL Field Day. I also helped set up for an hour on Friday the 22nd.

Field Day is best summed up as an emergency preparedness exercise with a contest aspect to promote amateur radio to the general public.

I participated in field with my local club, the North Shore Radio Association. It was held at Endicott Park in Danvers, Massachusetts.

One of the attendees was Dr. Mark Patterson, WB2OIL from Northeastern University's Global Resilience Institute who was there to interview fellow hams on their opinions on Field Day and how it pertained to emergency response. Despite my limited time of being a ham, I still gave my input.