Field Day 2024

Another back yard Field Day putting the club call (W4BXC) on the air is in the bag. Like last year, we were 1E SC.

As is typical for the end of June around here, the weather was hot and humid, but partly cloudy skies kept things at least tolerable. Fans came in handy as well. Fortunately there were no thunderstorms as often happens this time of year.

Had a bunch of friends over and introduced some of them to amateur radio. Most of the afternoon was spent casually operating in between hanging out, chatting and answering a few questions about amateur radio.

This year, the antenna for the 2m right (just used to monitor simplex an repeater activity) was a janky mag mount attached to the side panel of a PC case, and perched on top of my ladder. Seemed to work well enough. There wasn’t much in the way of repeater activity to listen to though. We did manage to convince a couple of our friends and one of their kids to get on the radio (VHF simplex) from across the yard.

The batteries did pretty well again this year keeping the radios running and putting out 100 W.

Band conditions seemed pretty decent, and most of the contacts were on 20m and 40m. Oddly enough, I heard very little on 10m.

Wrapped up the Field Day weekend with 102 contacts across the 20m and 40m bands. A few contacts short of last year’s total, but I’m satisfied with the result. 200 bonus points brings our score to 404 for this year.

Contest: FD
 Band     QSOs     Pts  Pt/Q
     7      37      37   1.0
    14      65      65   1.0
 Total     102     102   1.0
Score: 204
1 Mult = 1.0 Q's

Listening to the ISS repeater

It’s pretty easy to listen to the amateur radio repeater on the International Space Station (ISS) with a very modest set up. Transmitting and making contacts using the repeater is a little more complex, but not too much.

The ISS repeater downlink (what the repeater transmits on and what we listen to) is 437.800 MHz. Because the ISS is moving across the sky at a pretty good clip, the listening frequency needs to be changed as the ISS goes by to account for Doppler shift. At the start of the pass, because the ISS is moving toward you, the listening frequency needs to be a bit higher, 437.810 MHz. As the ISS goes past, it’s moving away from you so the listening frequency goes down. By the end of the pass, you’re listening at 437.790 MHz.

ISS Downlink frequencies

A table of frequencies to listen to for the ISS repeater downlink
Frequency (MHz)
Start of pass437.810
437.805
Mid pass437.800
437.795
End of pass437.790

If you program these frequencies into your radio’s memory, it’s easy to step through frequencies during the pass.

My set up is pretty simple. The radio is a Yaesu FTM-3207D, but probably any radio will work. The antenna is a simple dual band mag mount on a side panel from an old computer case that serves as a probably somewhat inadequate ground plane. All of it is about 2m above the ground on a shelf.

A dual band (2m/70cm) mag mount antenna on a metal sheet sitting on a shelf
Dual band mag mount antenna setup for listening to the ISS amateur radio repeater

It’s a pretty simple setup, and I’m kind of surprised it even works. Your mileage may vary depending on your local RF environment. My shack/office is full of electronics and can be a bit on the RF noisy side, but I have no problem hearing repeater activity during ISS passes.

I have the radio set to 437.810 MHz (start of the pass) and when the radio picks up the ISS repeater, there’s suddenly a bunch of activity on the radio. When reception gets static-y, I switch over to the next frequency.

This would probably work for listening to other satellites with FM repeaters, although I haven’t tried that yet.

NC QSO Party 2024 Results

Happened to notice that the results for the 2024 NC QSO Party were out.

W4BXC ended up with 58 QSOs, 38 counties, and 200 bonus points for a total of 4608 points. That put us in 11th spot out of 96 submissions in the SO-OUT-PH-LP (Single Op, OUT of state, PHone, Low Power) category. Not bad.

This year there were a total of 522 logs submitted, and 64352 QSOs.

Looking forward participating in to next year.

CQ WPX 2024 Log Check

CQ WPX log check results arrived in my email a little while ago. No busted calls!

************************** Summary ***************************

       6 Raw    QSO before checking (does not include duplicates or missing exchanges)
       6 Final  QSO after  checking reductions

      16 Raw    QSO points
      16 Final  QSO points

       6 Raw    mults
       6 Final  mults

      96 Raw    score
      96 Final  score

    0.0% error rate based on raw and final qso counts
    0.0% score reduction
      0  (0.0%) not in log
      0  (0.0%) incorrect calls
      0  (0.0%) incorrect exchanges
      0  (0.0%) missing exchanges
      0  (0.0%) duplicates removed
      0  (0.0%) calls unique to this log only (not removed)

********************** Results By Band ***********************

            Band   QSO   QPts  Mult

   Raw      160M     0      0     0
   Final    160M     0      0     0

   Raw       80M     0      0     0
   Final     80M     0      0     0

   Raw       40M     0      0     0
   Final     40M     0      0     0

   Raw       20M     0      0     0
   Final     20M     0      0     0

   Raw       15M     0      0     0
   Final     15M     0      0     0

   Raw       10M     6     16     6
   Final     10M     6     16     6

  Raw        All     6     16     6        96
  Final      All     6     16     6        96

************************ Multipliers *************************

  IO5   KP2   NP4   P49   PJ2   S55