Field Day preparation by the Antenna, Radio and Computer teams took place on Saturday. In the photo below, John, KI4UIP, Hal, W1EES; Tom, NY4I; Dave, KR4U and Johnnie, W4TSP work on two HF radios.
Below, the CW station gets tweaked by Tom, W4CU and Ron, KP2N.
Below, Ron has identified a problem with the CW configuration.
We will be setting up antennas on Friday, June 26 at 10:00 AM. All help is appreciated. Field Day setup will begin at 9:00AM on Saturday, June 27th. Lunch for those arriving early and setting up the station will be around noon. The fun begins at 2:00PM.
Don’t forget to bring an appetizer, side dish or dessert and your headphones.
A million points, that is… As a tune-up for the CW contest part of Field Day, several operators of the SPARC Contest Group fired up the W4GAC station to have some fun in the CQ WPX CW contest. This is a 48 hour event where we try to contact as many other stations anywhere in the world. In this contest, the goal is to work as many unique prefixes as possible. To make ourselves sought after in this contest, we opted to use NY4I as the club call (there are only 26 NY4’s in the world as the FCC never issued anything but 2×1 NY4 calls).
The “Schaef(f)er Brothers – Tom Schaeffer, W4CU and Tom Schaefer, NY4I
Tom, W4CU, Tom NY4I and Scotty N4RI started at 8:00 PM on Friday evening and went through to about 4:00 PM on Sunday (we did break from 1 AM – 9 AM each night—-we are not spring chickens any more you know).
When all was said and done, we worked 802 stations for a total score of 1,005,206 points. We had a goal of 1000 QSOs, but as it became clear that band conditions on Sunday were not going to allow that, we opted to go for one million points instead.
We all had lots of fun. Thanks to Tom W4CU and Scotty N4RI for joining Tom NY4I with operating and a special thanks to both Bob N2ESP and Dave KR4U for opening the club station for us.
Tom NY4I providing a great billboard for SPARC. 🙂
Tom, NY4I with the K3 and Alpha 9500 in the background.
We are always ready to activate the station for folks to operate. If you want to use a great station to run a simple one person contest or a full 48 hour team effort, all you need to do is ask. We focus on teaching new people how to contest first, and the points and contacts second! Newcomers interested in contesting are always welcome. After all, surely the lot of us are not delirious and there must be something fun to this contesting stuff. You owe it to yourself to find out why we love it and what you are missing.
Field Day is an ARRL operating event where amateurs setup portable stations using temporary (non-fixed) antennas and radios. Field Day is a test to allow us to establish emergency communications. The contest part of Field Day helps train operators on handling a high volume of messages that would be required during an actual communications emergency. It is also a time to have fun, socialize and learn something new about amateur radio.
This year SPARC will conduct Field Day at the DMI Facility where SPARC normally holds its club meetings. We will use temporary antennas and operate from outside the regular station.
We will have 3 stations (class 3A). This means one dedicated CW station, one dedicated SSB station and one floating station (CW, SSB or Digital). We do this to try and keep all three stations busy depending upon what mix of operators we have. There will ALWAYS be at least one CW station and one SSB station.
We need volunteers. This can only happen with people to help setup, plan and bring things. You will be able to sign up at the club meeting (as well as early by emailing president@sparc-club.org) with the dish you want to share. This will be for lunch Saturday, dinner on Saturday night and even breakfast on Sunday morning.
We need people that want to help operate and setup. I cannot stress enough how you do not need experience. Field Day is a space to learn. We have plenty of people to help you operate and learn how to install a rig, computer or anything else associated with Field Day.
For those that want to get a head start on logging at Field Day, we will be using the contest program called TR4W. This is a Windows version of the TRLog software. The program has a very small learning curve and it particularly easy for those that may not be used to computer contest logging. You can download the software and try it for yourself. There is no charge for the software. You can find all the information about the program including documentation, and downloading at http://tr4w.net/
Please check back at https://www.sparc-club.org for more Field Day updates.
You can find current information about Field Day on the Field Day page. Please check back frequently for the latest information.
Due to the severe intermodulation problem experienced by our 440MHz repeater, the engineering team has determined we need to add a Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System (CTCSS) to the repeater input. CTCSS, also knows as a Private Line (PL) tone will prevent the repeater from re-transmitting signals that do not contain this tone.
Once activated, all radios desiring to access the SPARC 440MHz repeater MUST transmit a 146.2Hz tone to activate the repeater.
Repeater tone access will be added in the near future, so program your radios now to be ready for the change. The 2M and 220MHz repeaters will NOT require any tone for access. Please direct any questions to repeater trustee Ron, KP2N.
A few SPARC members has the pleasure of visiting with Jerry, WB9Z and Valerie NV9L over breakfast recently. Jerry has been on numerous DXpeditions, while his fiancée Valerie is a host on the ham radio webcast “Ham Nation.”
L to R: Bob, N2ESP; Jerry, WB9Z and Valerie, NV9L
After a filling breakfast, we took our visitors on a tour of W4GAC. There we presented Jerry with a donation from SPARC for the K1N Navassa DXpedition. Jerry was one of the many operators that put this rare entity on the air.
The SPARC Logo appears on the K1N Sponsors page as seen below.
