Activities, Antennas, Featured, Field Day, General, Newsletter

Winter Field Day 2020 Is Coming

Winter Field Day 2020 is coming! The dates are January 24th – 26th, 2020. We had a lot of fun at Winter Field Day 2019 and we’re looking forward to the event again this year. The Nashua Area Radio Society will again be holding our operation at Keyes Memorial Park in Milford, NH. We are planning several new things this year. Here’s some more about our plans.

Our Planning Team

Operator Night Shift - The Most Interesting Hams In Amateur Radio...
WFD 2019 Operator Night Shift – The Most Interesting Hams In Amateur Radio…

A team has been working on our plans for Winter Field Day (WFD) 2020 for over a month now. The planning leads include:

  • Jerry Doty, K1OKD – WFD Overall Planning Leader
  • Craig Bailey, N1SFD – Antennas and Power Chairperson
  • Jon Turner, AC1EV – Station Chairperson
  • John Slater, KB1EEU – Shelter Chairperson
  • Fred Kemmerer, AB1OC – VHF+ Chairperson

Winter Field Day 2020 Plans?

2 pm and We Are On The Air! Winter Field Day 2020
WFD 2019, 2 pm and We Are On The Air!

With help from many other members, our Winter Field Day 2020 planning team is putting together a really cool operation. Some of the highlights include:

  • We will be operating on all of the HF bands from 160m through 6m.
  • Our antenna farm will include a 40 ft tower with a tri-bander and wire antennas for 80m and 40m
  • Our antenna farm will also include a second 40m wire antenna (a Delta Loop) that will enable us to have two transmitters on 40m at the same time.
  • We are planning an additional transceiver and we will be entering as a 5O (five Tx Outdoor) station this year
  • We are adding quite a few new bands on VHF and above. We’ll be on 6m, 2m, 1.25m (222 MHz), 70cm, 33cm (902 MHz), and 23cm (1.2 GHz). We will have yagi antennas for all of these bands.
  • John Slater is working on an improved shelter and heating system to keep us warm and dry
  • We will be equipping Rover stations for the VHF+ bands (2m, 1.25m, 70cm, 33cm, and 23cm). These stations will have Phone, CW, and Digital capabilities. We hope this will provide opportunities for enhanced VHF+ activity for all of the Winter Field Day stations in our area.
  • Our computer-controlled satellite ground station will be back

Upcoming Activities

Winter Field Day 2020
New for Winter Field Day 2020 – 1.25m Yagi

We have several activities leading up to Winter Field Day 2020. All NARS members are invited to join us for these activities. Planned activities include:

  • Saturday, November 23rd at 10 am – Yagi building party at AB1OC/AB1QB. We’ve secured several new Yagi’s to use for the VHF+ bands this year. We’ll be assembling the one for the 1.25m (220 MHz) band and testing in our shop. We’ll also recondition the driven element of a large 70cm yagi as well. This is a chance to see how a VHF+ weak signal antenna goes together.
  • Friday  November 29th at 9 am – VHF+ Mast Test at AB1OC/AB1QB. We are planning a second mast for our VHF+ antennas for Winter Field Day. During this session, we’ll be setting up the new mast with the antennas for 1.25m, 33cm, and 23cm to check it out and cut a new set of guy ropes.
  • Tuesday, December 10th at 7 pm – Winter Field Day 2020 Tech Night. We will be covering all aspects of antenna building, station setup, and operating for Winter Field Day 2020 at our December Tech Night.

We are also planning station tests for our HF and VHF+ stations in the near future.

Signups for setup and operating during Winter Field Day will be available at our December Membership Meeting.

We hope you’ll join us for our Winter Field Day activities and operation!

Fred, AB1OC

Antennas, Featured, General, Newsletter

EME Station 2.0 Part 4 – New EME Tower Is Complete

Our goal for this phase of our EME Station Project is to get our new tower up, install the Azimuth Rotator and Mast, and run the hardline and coax cables for our antennas from the shack to our new …

Source: EME Station 2.0 Part 4 – New EME Tower Is Complete

We got our new 26 ft EME tower up this past week. The new tower is a hybrid free-standing/guyed design and will support our planned 2M EME Antenna System.

This phase of our project involved:

You can read all about this phase of our project via the link above. The next phase of our project will include running control cables and installing a control cable junction box on the tower, hooking up and testing the rotator, completing our grounding and bonding system, and preparing to install the antennas and tower electronics when they arrive from M2 Antenna Systems.

Fred, AB1OC

 

Antennas, Featured, General, Newsletter

EME Station 2.0 Part 3 – Phase Tuned Receive Coax Cables

Our new 2M EME station will have Adaptive Polarity capability via MAP65. MAP65 requires that received signals from the Horizontal and Vertical planes of our antennas arrive at the receivers in our shack precisely in phase with each other. We used a VNA to precisely measure coax cable length…

Source: EME Station 2.0 Part 3 – Phase Tuned Receive Coax Cables

We are continuing to make progress on our new 2M EME Station. The MAP65 adaptive polarity aspect of our plans requires that the phase relationship between the Horizontal and Vertical elements of our antennas be precisely maintained by our receive coax cables.

The construction of these coax cables required us to use a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) to precisely measure and equalize the electrical lengths of our receive-coax cables. We know that a 1/4 wavelength section of coax cable which has an open-circuit at one end will appear as a low (resonant) impedance at the opposite end. If we use a VNA to precisely measure the minium resonant frequency of our coax cables in this way, we can use a simple formula to determine the cables’ lengths.

The article associated with the link above explains how a VNA can be used to measure the length of a coax cable. A frequency accurate antenna analyzer can also be used to make these measurements.

Fred, AB1OC

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