CW Station Operations

Our club, PART of Westford, MA USA, held our 2013 Field Day event at the Concord Rod & Gun Club again this year. We operated three HF Stations (SSB Phone, CW, and Digital) as well as a VHF and a Satellite Station this year. All of our operations were QRP 5 watts and used solar/battery power. The photo above shows Bob (W1IS) and Bill (AA1O) operating the CW station. Our day began with the setup of our antennas and the four stations.

Field Day Tri-Bander

Anita (AB1QB) and I handled the HF beam antennas for our Field Day Operation. This included a Hy-Gain TH-3JRS Tri-Bander loaned to the club by Allison (KB1GMX) which was installed 20 ft up on a guyed military push-up mast.

15m Buddi-Beam

We also brought our 15m and 10m 3 element budi-beam mono band yagis which we designed for portable operations. These antennas plus a G5RV and a 40m wire beam made up our HF antenna farm for Field Day. All of these antennas were brought to a common interconnect panel where they could be connected to any of the three HF stations. We setup all of these antennas at home the week before to confirm that they worked as expected and to ensure that they could be erected safely and quickly at our Field Day site.

VHF Tower

Another part of our team spent time to put up a Rohn 25G tower for our VHF Station. Allison, (KB1GMX) led this effort and supplied yagis for 6m and 2m. Operating on these bands QRP 5 watts is quite challenging and Allison was able to make a fair number of contacts by utilizing her considerable VHF operating experience.

Digital Station Battery Power

With the antennas up, we turned our attention to the setup of the digital station and its associated battery and solar power. The digital station is the most challenging in terms of off-grid power because we need to power both the Transceiver and a Personal Computer as the latter is integral to generating and decoding digital mode signals over the air. The power system for the digital station consisted of two 65 Ah dry cell deep cycle batteries and a solar charging system. The batteries were sized to allow operation of the digital station for the full field day period of 24 hours in the event that we had limited sunshine due to clouds or rain.

Solar Panels

The battery system used SunSaver MPPT charging system setup in a 30 Vdc configuration along with two PowerFilm 90W folding portable solar panels wired in series. We had good sunlight during the daytime and the solar panels were able to keep our batteries fully charged. The CW and SSB phone station used a few sets of smaller batteries and a solar panel to recharge them.

SSB Phone Station Operations

All three of our HF stations used Elecraft KX3 Transceivers. The KX3s turned out to be an excellent choice for our Field Day operations as they have low power consumption, a good receiver and provide excellent usability and external interfacing capabilities for automated logging, CW and digital operation. The photo above shows Scott (NE1RD) and Lyman (W1LKS) operating the SSB phone station. We used PCs on all three station to automate logging. We used Andy’s (KB1OIQ) xlog logger for the Phone and CW stations and the N1MM logger for the Digital Station.

Digital Station Equipment

Anita and I were the coordinators for the Digital Station and we decided to update the configuration of the digital station this year. In addition to the Elecraft KX3, we used a Windows 8 PC running N1MM/MMTTY/2Tone/FLdigi to handle the logging and digital mode processing.

Digital Station Software – RTTY Mode

N1MM provided a more contest-oriented logging setup as well as the ability to run multiple digital decoders to give us the best possible chance of receiving digital transmissions without error. For RTTY signals, we used a combination of the MMTTY and 2Tone encoder/decoders. For PSK signals, we used FLdigi. After some initial tuning, we got good results with this combination of software.

Satellite Station

Bob (KB1SWZ) put together a very competent Satellite station to complete our Field Day setup. Working LEO birds QRP 5 watts on Field Day provided to be quite a challenge as its hard to compete with the many higher power stations contending for the birds on Field Day.

Toolbox Talk

With all of the stations setup and ready to go, we provided a series of “Toolbox Talks” to help members of our club understand our field day stations and how to use them. Shown above is Scott (NE1RD) explain how to use the Elecraft KX3 which was central to all three of our HF stations.

Digital Station Operations

One of the best parts of Field Day is that it provides the opportunity to spend time with newer operators and young people to introduce them to many aspects of Amateur Radio and to provide them with opportunities to get on the air and try new things. Shown above is Fred (AB1OC) explaining the operation of the Digital Station.

Field Day Feast

We are fortunate to have our club sponsor a nice meal as part of our Field Day event. Charlie (W1ADL) and Rick (W1RAG) did a great job with food for our event this year. In addition to a great meal, this provides all of the club members participating in our Field Day event a chance to socialize and have fun.

We operated for the full 24 hour period again this year and managed to make a good number of contacts with our QRP setups. The totals for our effort were 722 QSOs (up from 587 in 2012) with a final score (including bonus points) of 7,355. A special thanks to everyone who contributed to or was part of making our 2013 Field Day event a success. We also very much appreciate Joe’s (KB1SSA) efforts to help us secure the excellent facilities at the Concord Rod and Gun Club for our Field Day event.

– Fred (AB1OC)