A Plebeian (@APlebeian)

Field day AAR For the first time we had at least one (and usually two) radios on the air the entire 24hrs - thanks to renting a cabin with AC so we could avoid the bugs and the absolutely insane heat. In previous years using tents, the all-too-common afternoon thunderstorm would end field day for the club since all the radios had to be put away - and then after rain it would be even more miserable. But this year, we had comfort - we had considered using a club member's cargo trailer with AC in it, but I think the cabin worked better since it gave people room to come and go. This year we also had (mostly) centralized logging. At least for the SSB/CW stations. Everything was logged into World Radio League live, so we got perfectly synced logs right from the start. Rigs, all powered from battery IC7300 - 10/15M daytime, 20M overnight (swapping between CW and SSB) IC7610 Daytime station for 20M (this one had to go home at night) ICOM IC-706MKIIG - 40m overnight station - my first experience using a rig w/o a band scope or many other modern features. Takes a different way of doing things FT-891- Rig that another guy brought in Sunday morning to work a bit more 20M TS-590SG - 6M FT8 Antennas 80M OCFD was great at night until wind knocked its mast over. For some reason we used this for 20M daytime as well the first day. 20M home made yagi was also quite fine, though 3-5 AM the band lost its juice 15M home made moxon would not hold the right shape, but it had flat SWR across the band so I ran it and made a ton of contacts on it actually - 15M band was very hot well into the evening. 10M vertical dipole - impromptu antenna I made since there was time and I had a 10M mast. Made a few contacts but we have no 10M passband filter so my radio was getting a lot of desense from the 20M station (It was broadside to the OCFD) 6M halo - I don't know much about it - I saw it once when it was down Things to do better: Encourage stations to be runners (especially on 20M SSB since we have the beam). Search and Pounce doesn't get you a lot of stations. I did try running CW in the early AM when 20M died (worked Sweden via that). I can handle that for a short time w/o CW macros. But would have really had a hard time sustaining it for a few hours. Loop on ground + TX switch so that overnight on the low bands we can hear through the noise on 40/80 Band-pass filters - we had filter for 15/20/40 - 10 and 80 might be nice Helical resonators for 20m and maybe also 40M - so I can run CW while another station is running SSB (especially needed next year since the solar cycle is declining). This could even be a cheap alternative to a band pass filter for 10M I think, A second long wire antenna so we can run 40 and 80 concurrently at night. Traffic on 20M was fairly light overnight and I really ran out of people to work, but we only had a single 40M capable antenna up so I couldn't switch bands even if we had good filtering Get a little bit more better at the central logging. Basically need to set up a local network so we can capture the N3FJP and N1MM packets in case people have special loggers they want to use to keep everything in sync Starlink Mini, or a dedicated hotspot for internet would be nice. I used my phone while I was there but I did have to leave for a few hours.