The 13 Colonies Special Event is coming soon. It is the largest on-air special event in the world and it will take place from July 1 (9 AM EST) to July 6th (Midnight EST). The idea of the event is to work each state which grew from the original 13 Colonies. If you work one or more of the 13, you will receive a certificate like the one above. There will also be two bonus stations WM3PEN at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, PA and GB13COL in the United Kingdom. If you work all 13 Colonies plus these, it will be noted on your certificate.
K2K New Hampshire QSL Card
Each Colony station has a K2x Special Event call and will provide a QSL card to confirm your contact. The Event logged over 126,000 contacts in 2015 with K2K New Hampshire contributing over 10,000 of these. You can see a recap of the 2015 K2K New Hampshire operation here.
13 Colonies Special Event 2016 – K2K NH Top Club
I am the Thirteen Colonies State Manager for New Hampshire and we have assembled a team of operators from our club to work the event. Fred, AB1OC and Anita, AB1QB will provide training for the New Hampshire operator team and will make their station available for use during the event.
Our 2016 Field Day Operation is rapidly approaching and our planning is in high gear! We have a great planning team working on Field Day this year and we have a lot of fun planned!
Site Layout at Hollis-Brookline High School
We will be operating at the Hollis-Brookline High School in Hollis, NH this year. We’ve been working on antenna plans and a layout for the site. We expect to be 7A or 8A this year. We are also going to try operating using a combination of Digital and SSB Phone from the SSB Stations.
Falling Derrick Tower and Beams
We will have two towers with Tri-band Yagis for 20m, 15m and 10m and Inverted-V antennas for 80m/75m. We will be using triplexers and bandpass filters to allow the Tri-band Yagis to be shared across three transceivers as we did last year.
One tower will be used for CW operations as well as supporting the club’s 4 Element, 6m Yagi. The 6m Yagi will be rotatable. Jeff, WA1HCO and Tom, AB1NS have some cool plans for the 6m station this year which include Meteor Scatter and Es Contacts if we can catch openings on 6m. The CW tower will also have a 40m Inverted-V Antenna.
The other tower will be used to support the SSB/Digital stations on 75m, 20m, 15m, and 10m as well as an 11 Element Yagi for 70cm (more on this below).
40m 3 Element V-Beam Plans
We are planning some new antenna and station projects for our 2016 Field Day operation. We are going to build a 3 Element, 40m V-Beam Array using three 50 ft guyed masts. This antenna should perform comparably to a 40m short 2 Element Yagi at 70 ft.
Digital ATV Demonstration on 70cm
We are also planning a Digital Fast Scan ATV link between our Field Day site and the Nashoba Valley Club’s site. This will allow us to send and receive Live Digital Video between the two sites on the 70cm band.
20m Buddipole Ground Plane Antenna for GOTA Station
Wayne, KB1HYL will be operating the GOTA Station again this year. We are going to put the GOTA station on 20m using a Ground Plane Vertical Antenna built from Buddipole Kit.
Club Meeting About Field Day
Our Field Day Planning team is planning a great presentation on Field Day 2016 at our next Club Meeting on June 7th and our Tech Night on June 14th will be all about the Technical Side of Field Day – Building Antennas, Setting Towers and Stations, Loggers, Digital Modes and much more. Don’t miss these!
We operated as N1FD/m (Mobile HF) in the New England QSO Party (NEQP) this past weekend. We began our operation on Saturday afternoon on the Massachusetts – New Hampshire State line where we activated two counties and two states.
N1FD/m NEQP Multi-Op Team
We entered the 2016 NEQP Contest in the High Power Multi-Op Mobile HF Category. We operated using SSB phone mode mostly on the 20m and 40m bands. Wayne AG1A, Jamey KC1ENX, and Fred AB1OC were the operators. We took turns operating, driving and navigating. We used Fred, AB1OC’s mobile HF station in his truck.
CQ NEQP from N1FD/m
We operated Saturday and Sunday for nearly the entire contest period. We spent most of our time calling CQ and we had several nice pile-ups to work.
Counties Activated by N1FD/m in the 2016 NEQP
The map above shows the counties in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont that we activated during the contest. Anita, AB1QB helped us to create a route of counties to activate which included some of the more rare counties in Vermont and New Hampshire.
Operating On a County Line in Vermont
We tried to focus on activations where we could be in two counties as once. These activations produced some nice pile-ups for us to work.
Operating On a County Line in NH
We parked on county lines with 2 wheels of N1FD/m in one county and 2 wheels in another. This gave us two QSO points (one for each county) for each contact that we made.
NPOTA Activation – Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP in Vermont
We had a few challenges along the way. We had some antenna related problems with our Mobile HF setup to deal with. Fortunately, we had some spare parts with us and we adjusted our operating style to overcome them. We also had to operate through a major solar event on Sunday. This made contacts very difficult but we still logged over 235 QSOs that day in spite of the conditions.
Wayne, AG1A Operating in NEQP 2016
All in all, we had a great time in the contest. We logged a total of 631 QSOs and we worked 58 Multipliers. Our claimed score was 36,598 – not bad given that this was our first entry as a mobile and our first time in NEQP. We worked 43 of 50 states and we had quite a few stations from Canada and Europe call in to answer our CQs.
There was some discussion on the way home about the Maine and New Hampshire QSO parties which will be held later this year. We hope to be N1FD/m again in one or more of those as well.
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