How do you prepare for Field Day?

kc0isu writes "The question isn't about whether you can help my club set up for Field Day. We already picked somebody for that job. The question is, "did you have lot's of fun working up towards that event? What did you do?" My answer to the question was formed this past Saturday.



KE4MMM(Mike) likes his job. But he loooooves to cook barbecue. He's hosted other events for our local club before. We already had the campground picked for Field Day. We also reserved it this past weekend to conduct a site survey of the place for field day setup. Mike was planning to be there to chip in and agreed to bring the cooker/smoker out and have a batch ready. He asked us each to bring $5. Well, for that sweet, tangy stuff, money is no object.



My shack isn't too big, so I basically packed it all up into a couple of boxes and brought them out to the campground. The park was great! We had power plugs 15' from the picnic tables under a pavilion. No nearby baseball parks with blaring PA systems (compared to a previous bbq we had). We were far from noisy traffic, and you couldn't see the main road, because the park was set far back.



KF4TQF(Brian) brought a Yaesu HF rig. Can't even remember the model number. I paid more attention to the antenna he was stringing up. "15m, Greg. Try it out!" "Where'd you get this?" "Ebay, $15 for 15m." I hooked it up to my MFJ 949E tuner, piped it into 259B analyzer, and looked at the SWR; 1.0. Good! Piped it into my Yaesu 747 and spun the dials. Noisy! Picked up traffic in too many languages to comprehend. Contacts in Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Minnesota, and more. I set up my 2m base and turned it to 146.52.



Everybody was goofing around, laughing, and definitely picking on everyone else. KG4HLP(Paul), our Field Day coordinator kept repeating, "Hey guys. It doesn't matter if we rack up points or not. That is going to be one fun weekend."



We looked at where we could string antennas, talked to the local park manager about ground rods, discussed logging software, and everything else.



KG4IPO(Jeff) backed up his car towards my rig, so we could plug in his mobile 10m whip antenna. It wasn't get enough RF ground, so we lugged over a 75lb. push-up pole, and hooked it to the ground wire. The thing leveled on my 259B whiz-box analyzer with SWR 1.0 for all of 15m! "Jeff, I don't know about 10m for that whip, but I'm using it on 15m for now."



Fun, food, and radio. Everybody was sad to leave later. I said, "We have to do this more than once a year, just for Field Day. I think every month or two would be great.""