Ham Radio Help Desk

This year our club ran 3A for the ARRL Field Day.

Radios included an Icom IC-756 Pro, TenTec Omni VII, Icom IC-746 (for the GOTA) and a Icom 7000 for VHF plus HF spare. All these radios performed quite well despite the high temperatures.

The 100 Watt Elecraft K2 stood above the others not necessarily on performance, but the elegant way the radio’s owner configured his K2, 100 Watt Amplifier and 100 Watt Matcher.
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ARRL Field Day 2010 was a blast. A member of our club bagged a satellite contact within two minutes of start time. Wow. One new item to this year’s operation was a G3TXQ Broadband Hex Beam antenna with elements for 20, 15, 10 and 6 meters.
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Well Field Day 2010 all started to come together pretty well. I put all the drinks and heavy items in the front to ensure good positive tongue weight. Pre-positioned the radio on that beautiful desk. Loaded up several antennas. Three masts plus stakes, etc. I even managed to figure out how to get my hex beam in there with a minimum of dis-assembly. It is quite a mess. I am sooo glad I selected that slinky wire that does not kink.

Here is a picture.
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Our Field Day in Virginia was pretty decent this year. We had plenty of visitors responding to our newspaper notice. Several folks took a turn at the Get On The Air (GOTA) station.

However, we always forget some obvious items every year.

The lessons learned from sunshine related issues are obvious. We forgot ways to shade them again this year because we got so busy with other preparation details.

Here are a few lessons learned from our Field Day written in the form of system requirements.

1. The network routers shall be set to one fixed speed rather than auto-negotiate the speed to keep the network connections more seamless.
2. The network routers should have their speed set to the minimum speed of 1 Mbps to provide the best sensitivity (this is plenty fast enough for the meager network needs with the N3FJP software).
3. The network routers should have their RF output power set to below the maximum (250 mW for the Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT) if the Field Day site is hot
4. All network nodes shall use static IP addresses.
5. Network nodes shall not use DHCP addresses.
6. The Network shall not use domain or host names.
7. The radios shall be protected from direct sunshine at all times.
8. The computers shall be protected from direct sunshine at all times.

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For those of you working with 802.11 equipment and in particular Linksys routers installed with DD-WRT, you are well advised to ensure Automatic speed negotiation is turned off and set to one speed.

It seems the network connection breaks just a moment while possible wireless speed connections are constantly re-examined. We have some very far 802.11 links and this causes nothing but trouble if you have the client server connection like that in N3FJP FDNet 2.5.

We set our units’ parameters to the slowest speed possible and the performance of our network connections went through the roof.

Back to Field Day…

Last year I made three posts about power in the generator category all related to issues we had with generators, UPS devices (why they don’t like some generators) and a thought about that dang fuel cap on the Honda EU2000.

If you are using generators at your Field Day please have a look at these posts for some previous lessons learned…

The Honda Inverter generators are, by far, the most fantastic generators ever to hit the market. Even with that fuel cap issue, they are still worth it. So very quite and such clean power… nice.

GL

If you are like many ARRL Field Day operations you have a Get On The Air (GOTA) station for guests.

We have done this every year I have been involved with my club’s Field Day and have had mostly good results. We usually have one Boy Scout troop stop by and make a few QSOs each. Also some technicians in our club like to operate the station during the late hours to get a chance to do SSB HF (yes we always have a control operator with valid privileges). Also it seems every year a new ham really enjoys the simplicity of the GOTA station without the concern over band sharing the other stations deal with.

Every year our GOTA is set up pretty much the same…

• Icom 746
• HF Antenna – Wire Dipole
• Microphone
• Key
• Computer for logging
• and that’s about it

Last year I posted observations about what the youth seem to enjoy most about our Field Day 2008…
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A sort of deer fever sets in before and during the ARRL Field Day event.

The excitement causes some of the most odd assumptions to occur.

Visit…

Field Day Urban Legends, Myths and FAQs

…for more details.

Bonus points are important for the annual ARRL Field Day event in June.

If you are thinking of participating in your local club’s Field Day festivities or are heading to the campground with your family for a Bravo station, bonus points are available.

One of my favorites is the Alternate Power Field Day bonus.

To quote the ARRL Field Day rules for 2009…
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This is a reprint of an article posted on CosJWT.com. More than ever the ideas of using 802.11 WAN network gear for Field Day makes good sense.

It took two years, but we finally managed a super reliable wireless network for our ARRL Field Day operations.

This year we will be at the same location and plan to accommodate up to five HF stations plus GOTA, VHF and, hopefully, some kind of Satellite station. Also a natural power station is planned, but will be co-located with an existing station.

The layout within the 300 meter circle will be close to what is shown in this picture…

Field Day Facility Layout

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