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Congratulations to everyone for a wonderful Field Day this year. WMUR TV Channel 9 sent out a crew yesterday, and a story about our Field Day operation made it on the news last night at 6:00 PM. For those of you that didn’t see the show, I have copied the story and we’ve posted it on our home page. Thanks to John, W1SMN for inviting WMUR to our Field Day!
Dave, K1DLM
I spent a little time this morning evaluating the band conditions on 10m and 6m in preparation for our upcoming Field Day Operations this weekend. To try for an “apples to apples” test, I used the antennas here with FT8 at 10 W input power. Our field day setup will have 1/2 the number of elements as we have here but we will be running 100 W so I believe the is to be a reasonable test. The beam heading for my tests was 260 degrees – the same as we will be using for Field Day.
As you can see from the image above, 10m was open for a good portion of the USA at 9:30 am this morning local time.
I made quite a few QSOs on 10m including several to the western states.
The 6m Band was also wide open and I was able to make about 40 contacts this morning include several to California and Arizona.
The openings on 6m and 10m were most likely a result of E-skip propagation. You can see the current propagation conditions on these bands here.
Digital, CW, SSB, and 6m operators at Field Day take note – its important to take advantage of openings on 10m and 6m during Field Day. These bands were not only open for FT8 digital but I am sure they supported SSB and CW contacts as well.
Fred, AB1OC
The folks who are operating our satellite station during Field Day this weekend will want to be sure to monitor for possible crew activity from the ISS. The following is a summary of the ISS passes at our Field Day site:
| Date | Time | Azimuth | Elevation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rise: 2018/06/23 | 13:01:30 | 305.2 | 0.0 |
| Max: 2018/06/23 | 13:06:40 | 17.8 | 24.6 |
| Set: 2018/06/23 | 13:11:47 | 89.2 | 0.0 |
| Rise: 2018/06/23 | 14:37:59 | 302.2 | 0.0 |
| Max: 2018/06/23 | 14:43:25 | 210.2 | 75.3 |
| Set: 2018/06/23 | 14:48:45 | 129.0 | 0.0 |
| Rise: 2018/06/23 | 16:15:10 | 282.3 | 0.0 |
| Max: 2018/06/23 | 16:19:19 | 231.5 | 9.1 |
| Set: 2018/06/23 | 16:23:25 | 180.7 | 0.0 |
| Rise: 2018/06/24 | 07:18:28 | 202.1 | 0.0 |
| Max: 2018/06/24 | 07:23:25 | 134.1 | 21.3 |
| Set: 2018/06/24 | 07:28:25 | 66.9 | 0.0 |
| Rise: 2018/06/24 | 08:54:20 | 248.1 | 0.1 |
| Max: 2018/06/24 | 08:59:41 | 332.4 | 51.3 |
| Set: 2018/06/24 | 09:05:05 | 54.9 | 0.0 |
| Rise: 2018/06/24 | 10:31:43 | 283.5 | 0.0 |
| Max: 2018/06/24 | 10:36:42 | 351.0 | 19.2 |
| Set: 2018/06/24 | 10:41:42 | 58.1 | 0.0 |
| Rise: 2018/06/24 | 12:09:01 | 303.1 | 0.1 |
| Max: 2018/06/24 | 12:14:03 | 11.7 | 20.1 |
| Set: 2018/06/24 | 12:19:03 | 79.4 | 0.0 |
| Rise: 2018/06/24 | 13:45:36 | 304.7 | 0.0 |
| Max: 2018/06/24 | 13:51:01 | 31.6 | 61.0 |
| Set: 2018/06/24 | 13:56:22 | 116.1 | 0.0 |
