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!
We’ve been thinking about building a portable Go Kit for VHF/UHF Emergency Communications (EMCOM) and Field Day Applications for a while now. The following is a list of our requirements for a Go Kit –
2m and 70cm operation with FM simplex and repeaters
APRS capability and tactical display for portable coordination
The heart of any Go Kit is the Transceiver. We’ve been using Kenwood equipment for our APRS iGate for some time now and we have had good results with it. Kenwood’s latest 50W transceiver with APRS is the TM-D710GA. This unit provides full support for APRS tactical applications and now includes a built-in GPS receiver making it ideal for our Go Kit application.
AvMap GeoSat 6 APRS Tactical Display
We have been using the Kenwood TM-D710 along with an AvMap GeoSat APRS display in our APRS iGate setup and the combination works very well. The AvMap display lets one see the location of portable and mobile APRS stations on a map display. This arrangement is perfect for coordinating activities in an EMCOM situation. The AvMap GeoSat 6 APRS display is no longer in production but I was able to locate a nearly new unit on eBay.
EMCOM Go Kit Packaging
iPortable Enclosure
We had a chance to look at the iPortable enclosure at Dayton and decided that their Pro 2 4U deep unit would be a good choice for our Go Kit application. The iPortable enclosures are based on a portable rack mount case and include a DC power system, speaker and headphone hookups, a light, and provisions for a cooling fan.
EMCOM Go Kit Construction
Radio Shelf
With all the components in hand, we began the construction of our Go Kit. Reliability is important in any portable system like this so we put some time into securely mounting all of the equipment and neatly arranging the cabling. First came the shelf which holds the Kenwood transceiver and a SignaLink USB sound card. A combination of drilling the shelf to secure gear with large cable ties and #8 stainless hardware was used here.
Coax Connector Cables
Our iPortable case was equipped with both SO-239 and N-connectors on the front panel to allow for antennas and feed lines equipped for either connector type. To make the change over between the connector types easy, we installed separate PL-259 jumper cables for each connector. One simply connects the appropriate jumper to the radio.
Display and Power Shelf
The power and AvMap display shelf were next. The AvMap display mount was dissembled and modified to accept a custom mounting bracket.
PWRgate Battery Interface and Charger
The iPortable enclosure was drilled to mount a West Mountain Radio PWRgate to handle backup battery charging and management. The PWRgate supports instantaneous switching between an AC power supply and a backup battery and can accommodate a wide range of battery types and sizes.
Backup Battery
The PWRgate was configured to properly charge our 18AH AGM backup battery. Note the use of a fuse in series with the battery for safety reasons. We used a Powerwerx SPS-30DM adjustable power supply set to 14.5Vdc to operate our Go Kit and to provide the proper charging voltage for our AGM battery.
EMCOM Go Kit Operation
Diamond X-30 Antenna and Mast
The last piece of the setup was the antenna. We wanted something that was portable, easy to set up and would provide good performance. We choose a Diamond X-30A 2m/70cm ground plane antenna and mounted it on a 12′ fiberglass push up mast. The feed line is made from 25′ of LMR-400UF coax. Several bungee cords are used to attach the mast to a fence post or other vertical structure.
Finished Go Kit In Use
The picture above shows the completed Go Kit in operation. We typically set one side of the Kenwood TM-D710GA to operate as an APRS transceiver and Digipeater and the other side to operate on a local repeater or simplex FM. The SignaLink sound card is used with a laptop computer running Fldigi and NBEMS for messaging applications. The iPortable case has a 13.8V lighter socket which connects to a power brick to power our laptop PC.
Go Kit Packaged for Transport
The Go Kit is quite portable when closed. All of the equipment and cable connections are enclosed and protected by the case’s removable end caps. We’ve tested our Go Kit during our club’s weekly repeater net and it worked great. The first real use of our new Go Kit will be at Field Day this year. It will be located in our public information tent and will be used as a “talk-in” system.
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