Field Day 2018 Wrap-Up

WAARC participated in ARRL Field Day on June 23-24, 2018. As in the past, the club entered as a class 2A station, along with a GOTA (Get On The Air) station and a VHF station.

Set up began on Friday morning, beginning with a gathering for breakfast. There was a decent sized group for a weekday breakfast, rivaling some of the large groups for the weekly Saturday breakfast. This was a good thing considering the possibility of raising antennas in the rain.

While it was raining heavily during breakfast, when the group shifted to the Field Day site the skies dried up, and there were periods of sunshine. There was a long enough dry spell to get the antennas up before another rain shower commenced.

Saturday started out warm and sunny, perfect for a weekend-long operating event. While we were ready to go long before the 2pm start time, we were delayed by about half an hour by a small thunderstorm close by.

Throughout the weekend we had plenty of food, and plenty of people to operate both stations. At one point Saturday afternoon we even had a few new hams operating on the SSB station because there was a line to operate the GOTA station.

By 2pm Sunday you could start to see some fatigue in the group. While the bands hadn’t been all that great, we ended up with 1932 contacts in the log. The total was down from last year’s total of 2100 contacts, but considering the band conditions it is a very respectable number.

Many Thanks go out to all that helped with set up and take down for Field Day. But more importantly the food committee deserves a large commendation for their work providing food for the weekend.