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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!

Getting on VHF/UHF

Scanning the Airwaves

By: noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Mannion)

26 June 2021 at 02:14

I have a Yaesu FT-991A, it's a great radio and it's served me well on HF, since replacing the broken FT-900, however, it's also a VHF/UHF rig too! That was one of the reasons I settled on it over the Icom 7300. Anyways, I finally got around to setting up a VHF/UHF antenna and getting on the air.

I ordered Dr. Ed Fong's (WB6IQN) DBJ-1 antenna back in May. Just this past week I finally got the antenna set up and on the air.

With my dad's help, we tried to first run the LMR-400 I ordered earlier this month through the wall like how the coax for my HF antenna is setup.

However, up in the attic we ran into some issues drilling through the wood, so we tried a different approach and drilled a hole right in the ceiling. It's not pretty, but it got the job done.

The hole drilled in the ceiling

We took a break for a few days because it was muggy and humid and I had to work anyways. Then yesterday, after cutting the PVC pipe recommended by Dr. Fong that I picked up at Lowe's and piecing it altogether, it was time to go up in the attic.

Up until last week, there was an old TV antenna that was installed when the house was first built by my grandfather, we removed that and tossed it in the trash since it was of no use as this house has long been wired for cable. You can see the TV antenna in some of these photos.

And up went the new antenna.

My dad hooking the antenna into place.

Originally the plan was to mount this outside and I brought an antenna bracket for that purpose off Amazon. But so far, I seem to be hitting the repeaters I want, so I might hold off on putting the antenna outside.

That's all for now, sorry I've been lacking in updates here, there hasn't been much going on with me and ham radio anyways aside from operating FT8, but that will hopefully change! You can always find me on Twitter though, I tend to update that more often this blog.