Field Day 2025
Many thanks to those of you who put so much effort into making this year’s Field Day event a success. This has always been a major team effort, and this year that was particularly true. I really appreciate how everybody chips in. I was especially struck by the hams in our club who helped out with set-up and teardown even though they couldn’t be around to make contacts. That includes Brian Davis (NT6F) who used his truck to tow the solar trailer to/from our site, and Tim Stehle (KN6FGH) who made a special trip to bring us pizza Saturday evening.
And a special thanks to Clay (N5YJZ) and Nick (KZ2V) for towing the WVARA tower trailer and the porta-potty trailer, Bobby (K0XI) for his van, and Kevin (KK6VF) who went out of his way to make numerous things come together – most notably our site’s AC power distribution and the solar array.
Changes in 2025: Back in 2023 and 2024, our Mora Hill operation was 12 Alpha Battery: three CW, three SSB, three digital and three VHF/UHF stations along with a “free” GOTA, satellite, and VHF station. Setting up all those stations and associated antennas was a real project. This year we worked to simplify the set-up process and reduce the amount of work required. Part of this change was scaling back to the 7 Alpha Battery category with three CW, two SSB and two digital stations plus the usual free VHF and satellite stations. In terms of HF antennas, we still had WVARA’s 4-band yagi on the club’s 45-foot tower trailer, but instead of last year’s three 2-element quads for 10, 15 and 20 meters, we opted for a 10/15/20 tribander up 30-foot on a push-up mast. This went up in half the time of last year’s quads. And Bobby’s van with its suite of antennas for the digital stations also went up quickly thanks to Dave Koberstien (N9DK). Installation of all of our site’s antennas and stations was completed by mid-afternoon!
As expected, going from 12A to 7A resulted in a drop in our total QSO count (down about 22 per cent: from 2316 QSOs in 2024 to 1807 QSOs this year). Our final score of 19,710 (17,705 QSO points plus 2,005 bonus point) is still quite respectable and will likely put us among the top ten scores nationwide – not bad considering there are more than 3,000 participating entries each year.
GOTA: This year we gave our youth-focused GOTA station a higher priority and made our second SSB station (and the SSB team’s triband yagi) available during Saturday’s daylight hours to our GOTA team. While that meant that we made fewer SSB QSOs, it also meant that the kids that visited our site had a much easier time making their first radio contacts. Chuck Kamas (AD6CL) and Kevin Smith (KK6VF) did a magnificent job of coaching a steady stream of youngsters. And our VHF station captain, Vince Bafetti (KB6NTW), helped with the visitor overflow by getting several kids on the air via his VHF station.
Murphy’s Law: Of course, Murphy paid us a visit. Saturday evening we had RFI issues with 80CW hammering 40SSB. After an hour of debugging, Bobby (K0XI) and Bill Fehring (W9KKN) identified the problem and provided a solution (voltage sag on the K3 mitigated with a voltage booster device from Bill). Major kudos to Bobby and Bill!
The International Space Station: Mark Sayer (W6IA) accomplished his satellite magic Sunday morning (eight satellite QSOs) and in addition achieved a two-way QSO with Astronaut Nichole Ayers (KJ5GWI) on the International Space Station — totally awesome!