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Field Day 2001 Post-Mortem Part One Another Field Day has come and gone, plans exercised, situations handled; new problems created and old problems solved. The purpose now is to look at what happened, look at what worked and talk about what didn't in the hopes that we can do it better next year.

First, let me say THANKS! to everybody that helped. To Steve for securing the Field Day site -- let's do it there again next year! To Howard for transporting an unbelieveable amount of equipment and endless calm. To Carl for helping everywhere, remembering things others forgot, and being a willing soul when difficulties demand. To the Friday Night Gang of Car DXers -- Doug, Art, Yumeng, Kongwei and Steve. Great way to spend Friday dark-time!!! To everybody who 'helped' put up my tent in the torrential downpour... hihi. To all the kids this year who made it a lot of fun. To Liu for cooking everything all the time! To Jeff for bringing the great cake. To Doug for being the great experimenter despite feeling crummy. To Norm for cranking out the 15 meter contacts. To Bill for being Mr. 80 Meters and being always calm and fun. And to everybody for not yelling at me as I cursed the ground anchors. We'll have a blast again next year.

A lot of feedback so far, definate patterns emerging. To start: Nobody had fun with the ground anchors! The native rocky soil and spiral-type anchors just don't go together. We spent about 3 hours total just getting anchors in and out. Not fun. But if we have towers we need the guys anchored. Another choice might be the answer; more on that later.

Putting up the towers is otherwise fun. Working a long time on one project by yourself is not. Teamwork is fun when the leader is having fun, not fun when the leader yells. Precious little of the latter this year, we're gaining trust with each other year by year and small things don't seem to annoy anymore. We're addressing problems as things to solve not as personal intrusions, and this year was lots more relaxing than I recall any prior year.

Playing radio and making contacts is fun. Everybody has their own pace, some have a favorite band, others a favorite mode. This year we might have had enough CW ops there to run two CW stations almost constantly! Definately something to think about for next year.

The Saturday Night Dinner is a lot of fun. I think I gained five pounds. Good sausages well cooked! And plenty of food.

Setup. We had enough folks Friday evening but not enough equipment to set up. Saturday we had almost enough people to set up but not enough time as rain kept us indoors until 11 AM. We started operating on 15 meters around 3, one hour late, and were fully set up close to 6 PM. Have to find a way to reduce setup time.

Running coordination. Since we're so close physically we can't run CW and phone on the same band at the same time. I made up some "station ID cards" indicating band, and strictly enforcing "you can only run on a band when you have the right card on your radio" really helped reduce problems. Now that we know that we can address the few remaining interference problems. Next year we'll very strictly enforce the card scheme.

Antennas. They are making and breaking our efforts. This year we had one major antenna OOPS! We got the A3 triband yagi up pointing backwards somehow. Despite all the eyes looking at it, including mine, we got the thing up pointing east instead of west. Since it was fixed, not on a rotor, we couldn't fix it without a lot of work which we decided not to do. We discovered that while it might not be a Force12 it definately has a front-to-back ratio that puts the back lobe well into QRP territory. 20 meter contacts were almost impossible off the back of that beam driving 100w! Without any pileups there were many stations I called and called who couldn't hear me at all. So I drove my Honda Civic up next to the building, put up the 20m car vertical, and tried. Better but still not good. 20 should have been one of our very strong bands but ended up very poor.

The R5 vertical is OK on 15m but lacks gain compared to the A3 we used last year. A 132 foot dipole at 25 feet works pretty darn well on 80 out to about Ohio, then it gets sketchy past there. No surprise, just another "radio fact of life" playing out. Even with a horridly mismatched spliced-up feedline -- 70 feet of RG-58 (!) feeding two runs of 450 ohm ladder line twist-tied together (that's right, no solder!) gave surprisingly good results. Imagine what a real matched feed would do...

The 40m dipole was useless this year. For some reason the darn thing just didn't seem to work! No idea why, it was fine last year and KF2DX loaned his SWR meter, which saw nothing wrong with the antenna-plus-feedline. Ended up not being an issue as Doug used the V-Beam with great success on both 40 SSB and CW, and 80 meter CW.

The V-Beam -- great antenna! As Siegfried pointed out in last month's issue, half a rhombic works pretty darn well. Doug strung up two 280 foot legs, 25 feet high at the feedpoint at about 6 feet high on the far ends, pulled pretty taut. Worked very well, though tuning was a bit sharp on 80 meters. That was a function of the leg length -- you can "properly design" them to a particular band and they behave very well. Experimenting is fun, and we learn so much!

Commercial power and running water are both good things. Tenting in torrential downpours and high winds can lead to sleeplessness. But camping is definately a good thing. Doug's big rolling house is very very cool, actually made a few of us think hard.

So, what about plans for next year? The bulk of that we'll leave til next month, but for now start thinking "wire antennas". Rotors and beams are doing great on 6, 2 and 440 but I believe we need to think "big pattern, stationary" for HF. I have some definate thoughts, let me know if you do too and we'll continue next month.

73, Mike N2VR

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