Chris (KK7SM) and I went to Canyon Lake this year for Field Day... it was much nicer than trying to sleep at roadside parks! For one thing, no drunk college kids pulling up at 0300 and tossing beer bottles out of the car... plus, we could put up a real campsite rather than sleeping in the truck!
Our plan was to have everything ready well ahead of FD weekend, including all the cables needed to run RTTY/PSK and the CW keyer; However, thanks to Fed/UPS, plus some not-so-clear diagrams and other factors, we ended up with non-functional cables, putting RTTY/PSK on the back burner... so we made the call to go almost totally CW this year - I think we made 6 phone contacts, and then we bailed and ran CW for the rest of the time that we operated. It was rather warm and humid, so we were taking frequent breaks, and we ended up calling it a day much earlier than last year... even so, we came only 4 points short of our score last year! I'm sure that if we had known that, we would have stayed on for 3 more CW contacts... oh well. We were able to copy the CW and RTTY Field Day bulletins; receiving was not the issue, it was the transmit side that was jacked up. And, as a sign of being at the bottom of the sunspot cycle, we almost exclusively operated on 20 meters... we made a couple of contacts on either 10m or 15m, but 20m was where it was all happening - to paraphrase the commercial, "Hooray, 20m!"
We are already plotting for next year; I think we are going to switch from 1C (mobile) to 1B (battery power), so that we can use better antennas... some of the battery-powered guys we ran into almost blew our speaker out, and you know that they weren't running 1500w on battery power (unless they were operating from the U505)! However it works out, though, we will definetly have a good time doing it - Field Day has gotten better every year! We had awesome chow on Friday night (thick steaks with beans and garlic potatoes) and Saturday morning (Beef sausages, scrambled eggs), and lots of good camp coffee... too bad it wasn't about ten degrees (F) cooler... that's what we get for having Field Day in June though - would it be so hard to have it in March?? :)
* If none of this made any sense, go to the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) website and find out more about Amateur Radio - or just ask that guy/gal with the funny tag and all the antennas on their vehicle :)
