June 30
The HexBeam is up and working, thanks to the help of Dave Wilson, N4DW. He came over Friday and helped me put the antenna on the mast. I spent the rest of the day pushing and pulling things around until the antenna was at the limits of the mast, 30 ft up in the air. All the guys are tight, although sometime in July I will need to check the tension. Hopefully the antenna is up and won’t get blown down like the last time.
I spent about eight hours over the weekend playing radio during Field Day. I put my big battery pack on the power bus and ran 1E. Logged 84 contacts (4 duplicates) during those 8 hours. Did PSK and RTTY with no voice or CW operations. The more often I work contests, the more I understand the rules and work at improving my score through better operation.
I wanted to run digital since it scores the same as CW. So for the first hour I ran PSK. During that hour I logged 21 contacts all PSK. With the HexBeam running it was possible to hold the frequency. Running 40-50 watts with a beam really gives you command.
During the next hour I logged 15 contacts-14 PSK, 1 RTTY. The limited number of PSK stations was making it more difficult to find non-dupe stations to contact.
By the third hour I only had four contacts-all PSK. The fifth hour was four also, RTTY only. Sixth hour was four RTTY and three PSK.
I went to dinner and came back several hours later, so starting at 00:30Z ish I continued to log between four and five contacts per hour until I gave up at 02:45Z. I did a little better Sunday morning running about six per hour evenly mixed between RTTY and PSK. Again after taking a break for church and lunch, I came back and ran for another 30 minutes…That finally got my total up to the 80s.
Moral of the story, for field day at least you cant run digital mode without CW capabilities if you want to place well. Also being limited to 20M and up – no 40M or 80M antenna of any type, limits the number of stations that are available during the night-and night seems like it is the majority of the contest. I know that it isn’t the biggest part but when the traffic slows down it sure seems long.
One other issue, LotW should be the final depository of all of our logs. I like eQSL and now that CQ Magazine is honoring eQSL QSLs they have a nice advantage but as an ARRL member I sure wish we would use our native logging depository. I do both LotW and eQSL. Good logging programs can handle uploads to both systems so there should be no hesitation in using both.