Field Day is the holy high holiday in amateur radio. It’s like Easter and Christmas got together and had a baby, and the baby became Field Day. It is an occasion to socialize with your friends, take radio outdoors, and stay up all night making QSO’s. Many people really get into the event- I’m not one of them. This year, however, Field Day happened to coincide with Jim’s, N4BFR, birthday and so I put in to take time off from work in order to celebrate both his birthday and get a little operating time in as well. He was good natured enough to humor me and helping me to work the event using my call. I suppose I should at least get Worked All States at some point in my amateur career, right?
We decided to operate as a completely digital station for the event. We ran all sorts of modes: PSK31, RTTY and WSJT-X. I’m glad we didn’t really care about how many Q’s we would make, because the bands were in horrible condition for the entire event. 20 Meters seemed to be the band everyone had some degree of luck with, though the lower bands supposedly opened up later in the evening and early morning. We didn’t run the event as a contest or even for the entire 24 hours- we instead wished to enjoy a leisurely pace. We nevertheless had a great time making what Q’s we could and did attempt some satellite contacts and a direct contact with the ISS. We weren’t successful in that regard, but we had a great time trying and may have located some excellent spots for future satellite attempts.
Something that I did learn this year while waiting for decodes was that social media can be used as a powerful propagation map. In this case, I don’t mean G+ or Facebook, but rather using Twitter. It’s near real time conversation approach is ideally suited for checking out what other people are experiencing right then- so if someone reports 10 Meters is open to WA, for instance, it might be an opening you want to investigate. It’s just another tool that some may find helpful. In my case, it was a way to commiserate with others about the poor band conditions!