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