This year for Field Day, we hit the road - literally! We drove the BRDM* out to Marble Falls, and drove around the Lake Buchannan area, operating 1C (single-operator, mobile) as usual. We got to see a lot of the Hill Country, and we made 255 contacts for over a thousand points - more than double our effort last year! Even though the bands were supposed to be dead (since this is the bottom of the 11-year sunspot cycle) we found plenty of people to talk to... we had a mix of voice and CW (Morse Code) contacts, and a lot of fun! We got to witness the awesome sport of WalMart Parking Lot Truck Racing - apparently it gets very boring in Marble Falls at 10pm... breakfast at The Blue Bonnet Cafe was just as good as advertised... by the time Chris dropped me off at my house around 9am, I'd been up for 25 hours (!) and the Sandman was beating me senseless. Chris's new radio really made the difference - we heard more signals than ever, and if you can't hear them, you can't work them!
Sunday after I got home, I promptly crashed for 8 hours... then got up and stayed up until almost 3am :) I had taken Monday off to allow my sleep schedule some time to re-synchronize; a good thing, too - it took that long! Kudos go to Bob and Jessica Logan, operating NZ5A in the 2B-2Op (battery) category, with almost 400 contacts, over half on CW! We did not get to work them this year, but we did work the same contact right after they did :) Great job, guys!
* BRDM: Big Red Dodge Machine - you thought we had Soviet-era infantry vehicles in our garages? Hmmm... not a bad idea :)
