The Nashua Area Radio Society has been using a 3-element 40m wire beam antenna for Field Day for the last several years. The antenna uses three guyed 50 ft. fiberglass masts from Max-Gain Systems. The antenna uses three inverted-V style elements separated by a little over 50 ft. Since we are in the northeastern United States, we can point the antenna on a fixed, 260° heading and it covers the entire U.S. well.
40m V-Beam – EZNEC Antenna View
Our 40m V-Beam antenna was initially designed using EZNEC 5.0. It was manually optimized for decent gain and front to back performance and it worked quite well. Recently, we decided to try automatic optimization software on the antenna as part of a tune-up on the design for Field Day 2018. After looking around on the Internet a bit, we discovered a software package called AutoEZ which looked ideal the my project. You can read more about the optimization project and see the results via the link below.
Our Field Day Wire Antenna information package has been updated to reflect the results of the optimization work. We have also added additional information to make the setup and tuning of our wire antenna including the 40m V-Beam easier. You can see the information package here.
We plan to operate in the 10A category. We will be adding 3 digital stations to get to the 10A.
Digital Field Day Station
Field Day Planning Meeting
Join us at our first Field Day Planning meeting on May 7th at 7:00 pm at the Nashua Public Library. We can use many volunteers to put up towers, operate CW, put up Wire Antennas and much more. Hope to see you there!
Field Day 2017 is but a memory for us now. Dave, K1DLM, our Field Day Chairman, and the entire Field Day team did a great job with putting together our Field Day operation this year.
We are still adding up our score and collecting pictures and video from everyone. I wanted to get something out quickly so that we could begin to enjoy some of the memories. So here is my quick Sights from Field Day 2017….
Our Field Day Telegraph Article
We did a fantastic job on publicity this year…
The Parking Lot Was Full
and the parking lot was full of visitors and members on Saturday and Sunday.
Our Public Info Tent Is A Hit
Our updated Public Information Tent was a hot spot for our many visitors (over 45 visitors signed our guest register)!
ARRL Section Leaders – Peter, K1PJS And John, K1UAF
The ARRL “brass” came out early to congratulate Dave, K1DLM our Field Day Chairman, and to tour our site.
The Food Was Awesome!
The food was unbelievably good – thanks, Valerie!!! And the N1FD cafe’ was a hot-spot as usual.
Everyone operated very hard and we made more contacts than last year!
CW Ops – Dennis, K1LGQ
Our CW operators were amazing again this year. Here’s Dennis banging out CW QSOs. Dave, KM3T even operated SO2R for a period – calling “CQ” and working contacts on both 20M and 40M CW at the same time! Gene, W3UA brought his CW skimmer and we set up an OCF dipole to provide on-site CW spots.
And The Generators Played On…
And the new generators worked flawlessly and were much easier to service.
and our visitors got a kick out of seeing the computer controlled satellite antennas.
Team Finchum In Action
Team Finchum was in high gear as always – here’s Abby, AB1BY operating with her brother Connor, KC1GGX. It seemed like Abby was on every SSB station that I looked at all weekend long…
New Digital Station For 2017
Our new SDR powered Digital Station worked well and we had lots of digital contacts using the antennas on the new 60 ft. tower.
The SDR GOTA Was Cool!
The SDR-based GOTA station worked out super well. Ira, KC1EMJ was our GOTA coach and was busy on Saturday and Sunday introducing our guests and newly licensed members to “high-tech” Amateur Radio. We had many young people try Amateur Radio for the very first time on our GOTA station.
Anita, AB1QB, our scoring chairman is still working on tallying up our score but it will be higher than last year.
Please take a minute and send me any photos or video that you have from Field Day 2017. We’ll be producing a video of all of the fun for the Field Day 2017 Recap at our club meeting on July 11th. Don’t miss it!
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