The 2016 edition of the ARRL Field Day has come and gone. Did we make a whole lot of QSOs? Nah…
It’s a social event; so it’s more about good company and good food than anything else. And we had fun!
Mother nature, as always, had some surprises in store. Strong winds, heavy rain, and thunder and lightning Saturday afternoon. We ended up having to move the small generator because it got soaking wet. And even after we relocated it we decided to shut it down until the (horizontal!) rain quit.
Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
Nasty weather.
So we ended up running the whole station off of the backup batteries for a while, in order to give them yet another good test:
Let’s leave that noisy box off for a while 🙂
It’s good to have a backup for the backup! 🙂
Oh well. Free car wash for all vehicles in the parking lot!
The vehicles turned out to be water proof.
Meanwhile, inside, this happened:
Left to right: KU5Z, KS5TX and K5WW.
That’s right: KU5Z on her phone again; while KS5TX and K5WW do all the hard work! 🙁
And some time later, this happened:
Trading places.
All in all: we didn’t do too bad. Surprisingly, we made much more RTTY QSOs than expected:
Where was our CW guy???
In fact: we made more digital QSOs than anything else. Then again, with two die-hard RTTY operators at the helm, not too surprising after all. 😉
And then this image, just for fun:
We got almost every ARRL section!
The North Carolinians were out in full force!
Thanks to all participants, visitors, sponsors, cheer leaders, photographers and folks who bothered to log us. More fun next year 🙂