1999 Nude Field Day
6-28/29-99 Well, FD is over
and now I can get down to business! We had a successful field day even if the site was not at
a naturist resort. Our site and time was compromised by the fact that I had to work Sunday
and couldn't do the whole event. We decided our strategy should be to work to get the call out
there and have fun, rather than going for the point totals. We operated using phone only with
100 Watts output to Ben's R5 vertical. Over 600 contacts in about eleven hours before the
battery dropped to 50% and we shut down (about midnight). I'll send you photos as soon as I
have them developed. Despite the partly cloudy, hot weather, Ben's solar panel worked like a
charm and kept the battery up to 90% capacity until the sun went down. Propagation was so good
on 15 and 10, those were the only bands we operated. We literally were able to hold a freq.
for over an hour at a time and had frequent comments like "are you guys running a kilowatt?",
"Great signal here into central Washington!". Our first secret was our antenna location,
perched on the north side of an E-W ridge with a 300 foot drop off to the north just feet
from the antenna base! We had pipeline propagation on 15 meters into Washington state,
the north central border states, and much of the north east. DX included Puerto Rico,
Newfoundland, Argentina and Hawaii. Our second secret was my YL Crystal, N5LEQ.
She couldn't assist until about 6 PM local, but then took the mic and proceeded to hold the
frequency on 10 meters for over an hour and a half putting over 100 contacts in the log!
Something about a YL's voice! Ben is doing the log this year and will transcribe it to the
Fielday program for duping and submission to ARRL.
Steve KG5BR
