"CQ Field Day, CQ Field Day from kilowatt seven romeo ... K7R!"

That phrase is now permanently burned into my synapses. After operating or logging for almost the entire time from 11am Saturday to 11am Sunday, that phrase has been said literally thousands of times. I did take a nap between 2am and 5am Sunday, but basically that was just because the noise on the 80m band was so loud and my back was thrashed from sitting at a wooden picnic table for hours and hours. We operated continuously either calling CQ or scanning and pouncing on others calling CQ. It was interesting some times that we could hear two parties clearly who couldn't hear each other very well at all.

From what I heard, the propagation wasn't very good. Most of the contacts I made were along the west coast. Alaska, BC, Washington, Oregon, California. We did get some southwest and east coast stations too, but mostly on the west coast. The antenna was a sky-loop, suspended up about 60 feet, from half a dozen ropes to tall trees all around the perimeter of the lawn. It was a pretty amazing sight for a temporary antenna. Thanks to Icom for letting us borrow the 756 Pro III radios, those were pretty cool. I learned a little about the rig, but mostly just enough to operate for the contest. It sure would have been fun to make some foreign contacts for sure though. Here is a video from a guy in Seattle (K7HV) who made contact with one of our stations as his second contact.

As a team, we made lots of contacts in a lot of different modes. I personally operated the SSB station on 20m, 40m, and 80m for the day. We were operating 5A (5 simultaneous transmitters), completely independent of commercial power, on a total of three generators. I don't have the final numbers yet but I think the team logged over a thousand contacts. We used the N3FJP logging software which is user friendly but unfortunately relies on continuous network connectivity which is hard to keep running 24/7. I hooked my laptop up to the 27" wide screen LCD TV so the operator could get a clear picture of the software with the callsign and location and make sure both the operator and the logger got the data correct. That part wasn't a hardship...

The generators were fairly reliable until we realized that one was putting out only about 70V so we had to shut it down. The second one ran fine until 9PM when its solenoid failed, and the crew had to figure out how to repair the thing in the heat and growing darkness... They got the job done and got it back on line within an hour. Since we had the radios running direct from AC power from the generators, not only did we lose all wifi communications, we also lost contact time in the contest. Next time we will run all the radios off of car batteries, charged by an Astron charger running off the gen. We probably could have run the radio for 4 hours just off the battery I figure. My generator has a direct 12VDC output as well as the AC, so I could use that for a much more reliable and direct approach to emergency power.

The weather was hot as hell. And I've been there (SoCa), so I know. The thermometer under the awning at my operating station read 95 for almost the entire day Saturday. It didn't cool down to even 80 until after 9pm. There were few breezes and they only blew hot air around. It was really pretty brutal being out on the grass for that long in that heat.

We shut down Sunday at 11am, just as it was beginning to top 90 degrees again. Fortunately, we were all packed up and leaving the park by 1PM. We had a large crew, so cleanup was pretty fast. All in all there were some fun times, but the heat and bugs at night really took most of the fun out of it for me. For sure the next time I do emergency communications, I will be operating INSIDE my trailer instead of next to it.