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Field Day for 1998 is now in the record books and it was quite a successful event for KWARC. While we probably won't win our category over more serious contesters, we did operate as 6A (6 stations, emergency power) and came away with a very respectable 1163 contacts and 2950 total claimed points. I believe that makes it the most successful in recent years. We had stations operating 160 CW/phone, 80 phone, 40 phone, 20 CW, 6 phone and 2 phone - a good sampling from right across the most popular bands. A real boon was a 100 foot crane arranged for by Mark VE3THG of the VHF group. While the crane was primarily to give some height to their beams, it made a stellar attachment point for one end of almost all of the HF dipoles as well. Gord Hayward VE3EOS, John Holmans VE3VRA and Joe Street VE3UXE were valiantly working 160 meters and, while the band stayed mostly dead, had at least double the total contacts of any other station they contacted. While they had discussed loading up the crane as a 100' vertical, they actually went with an inverted V with the apex at the top of the crane and the free ends about 10 feet off the ground. Joe gave everyone a QRP demo on Sunday by setting up his solar panel, duct tape diamond loop and techno-flash day-glow QRP rig and promptly making a CW contact into Indiana - way to go Joe! Former club president Dave Knight VE3PMT and Paul Walrath VA3VCI were working 80 meter phone on the club's venerable FT-101ZD from Dave's motor home with great success and the Marshal Killen Field Day trophy was proudly on display as a measure of their success last year. Alas, it was not to be a repeat but they'll be back in there fighting next year. Current president Paul Cassel VE3SY was working his traditional 40 meter phone from a motor home borrowed from Bill Aver VE3WDL. Paul started out with an asymmetric dipole (¼ - ¾) designed by Rocco VE3YJ but it turned out not to work as well under field conditions as on paper and Paul soon switched back to a more conventional dipole design. (Paul suspects that Rocco was really a saboteur from the Guelph club to keep our total artificially low, hi hi). Bob McKie VE3MCK gave a little help also and there's a great picture of him with the headset on in the club roster on the web. Paul came away with possibly a personal best at 443 contacts. Although Paul's total was impressive, he was outdone on points by the 20 meter CW team headed by Walter Baxter VE3NEI with co-operator Dave Sullivan VE3RBA and logging by Robert Johnson VE3RXJ and Bob McKie VE3MCK. This team racked up 302 contacts, which count double for CW, and win the trophy this year with 604 points. The group was operating from Dave's rather unique motor home with an extended dipole (which also didn't work very well and reverted to a standard ¼ dipole). The award for the most sheer fun must go to the VHF team of Tedd Doda VE3TJD, Mark VE3THG and Andy VE3SXK. While the band started out slow, a great 6 meter opening started at daybreak Sunday and lasted until we has to pull the plug. Contacts were coming fast and furious from As far away as Florida, Louisiana and Texas - so fast that Tedd burned up his laptop logging it all and a quick replacement had to be found. They say Field Day creates its own band openings with all the RF being pumped into the air and now I believe it! As you may know, we changed the site to the parking lot of NCR in north Waterloo this year in an attempt to be more accessible. While the new site worked quite well for the operators, no one from the public came out, perhaps because none of the media gave any advance publicity based on the press release, and there were also very few club members as well. I'd like to give a special thanks to Stratford Crane Service for providing the outstanding crank-up, fold-over tower, Dave Knight VE3PMT for the M&M hamburgers and hotdogs and especially to Bell Canada and Gord Lomoth VE3GHL for the loan of the two first class Honda generators (I've already put in a request for next year). A good time was had by all - the only thing missing was you! See you next year! Dave VA3DGS KWARC FD Coordinator BACK TO MAIN MENU For more information email info@kwarc.org [ TOP ] © 1998 Kitchener-Waterloo Amateur Radio Club Comments and bugs reports to webmaster@kwarc.org