WHEW did we have a blast at Winter Field Day 2024! We did the thing, and we did it pretty well.
The short version of the story is we got a great location, had enough people and equipment to keep transmitting for 24 hours straight, we had enough food to keep us (and some of the local wildlife) fed, and we had enough coffee to put hair back on my head. We learned a lot and even made a new ham! You can’t ask for much more than that.
The long version: This is only my second Winter Field Day, and my first with Jackson County, but everything I’ve seen and heard indicates it was a great success. A few of us had been going to Stevenson City Park since the land it’s on is now a Parks On The Air entity (K-9880, Crow Creek Nature Refuge) and we quickly realized it would be an excellent Winter Field Day location. I reached out to Stevenson City Hall, made the arrangements, and we had their park pavilion for WFD.
We did a good deal of planning and preparing for WFD. We bought band pass filters and kept stations on one band each, and gave our antennas as much separation as we could, to ensure we didn’t have stations interfering with each other. We located and worked on a club-owned HF rig, a Kenwood TS-50S to ensure it could run digital modes, CW, and phone effectively. We even planned on having our monthly exam session there.
We used moving blankets and tarps to enclose part of the pavilion, giving us plenty of room to operate. We had electric and propane heaters to keep us warm. It was a rainy day and a chilly night, but our hard work and effective planning made it a safe and enjoyable situation.
We encouraged hams with less experience on HF to get on the mic and make some contacts. We watched these guys gain experience and become better operators, which is a big part of any field operation. We tried different antenna types, from an off-center fed dipole to verticals to plain old speaker wire from Walmart, tuned as a random wire.
I brought my charcoal grill and some meat, and a couple other folks brought food to grill. Bringing food and grilling it is a cheap and effective way to feed everyone what they want to eat for an outdoor event. The only snag was when we didn’t secure the leftovers well enough, and a local kitty cat got into it. We still had plenty left, and that cat ate like a king.
The club rig had some rig control issues after many hours, but otherwise it performed very well. The random wire antenna I was running on the Kenwood let too much RF get into the external keyer on higher bands, and it kept sending extra dits and dahs, so I had to run my paddle as a straight key for the last hour or so of the event. Note to self, bring a backup straight key next time!
We had ups and downs, but we accomplished a lot, and we’re taking what we learned to ARRL Field Day in the summer!
73, Mike Kelly KY4LV
