The 13 Colonies Special Event will take place July 4th week again this year. Many members of our club will be operating under the K2K New Hampshire call sign. Contact Fred, AB1OC for details.
Tag Archives: On The Air
Saint-Gaudens NHS – Mobile HF Trial Run For Our NPOTA Activation
The Nation Parks On The Air (NPOTA) program was created by the ARRL to commemorate the National Park Service Anniversary (100th). Aron W1AKI, Merle W1MSI and Fred AB1OC made a trip to Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in NH this past week. Our goals were to seek permission for a Club National Parks On The Air (NPOTA) Activation at the park as well as to see the site and do a brief trial activation. I am happy to report that we achieved all of these goals and also activate the park using our Mobile HF station!
Aron and Fred put together a presentation which we shared with the head ranger, Greg Schwarz at the park. Our goal was to create an understanding of who we were, why we want to Activate Saint-Gaudens NHS, what our activation would involve and how we would relate to the National Park Service Anniversary celebration this year. We had a very good meeting with Greg and we secured permission for multiple activations of the park over the summer months. We will share more about what we are planning to do and the dates for our activations at our next club meeting.
The park grounds are very beautiful and will be absolutely stunning in the summer time!
Saint-Gaudens was one of America’s greatest sculptors and some of his works and their history are nicely set in the building and gardens which make up the park. There is plenty to see and do in the park.
The park has a large, open meadow which is surrounded by trees. The meadow is partly used for overflow parking and should offer a good area for us to use a mobile station plus a portable station when our club activates the park. We will be allowed to use a small generator and put up a small screened shelter to protect us from sun or rain while we operate. We were also invited to set up a table to share information about our club and about Amateur Radio in the area of the park which is frequented by visitors. The park hosts open air concerts most Sundays during the summer months. Greg indicated that about 200-400 visitors attend the summer concerts. He felt that this would be a good time for us to activate the park as there would be many visitors in the park for these concerts.
Greg also allowed us to park in the meadow and activate the park as part of the National Park Service Anniversary celebration. Aron W1AKI, Merle W1MSI and Fred AB1OC did a brief trial activation to get an idea of what propagation would be like in the park. We used Fred’s Mobile HF Station for the activation and we operated as N1FD on the 20m and 40m bands for about 45 minutes. If the trial run is any indication, we are going to have a lot of fun when our club does the real activation in the summer. In 45 minutes of operating, we gave 80+ happy Amateurs NPOTA NS-60 on a combination of the 20m and 40m bands. We were easily able to work stations in all regions of the US and we put 29 states and 4 DXCC’s into the log during our brief activation. We had folks in Alaska, Portugal, Poland and Canada call in and we had a good pileup for the entire time that we operated. We were using a paper log for the trial run and we had a hard time writing fast enough to get the QSOs into the log!
We hope that you’ll join us for one of our Saint-Gaudens activations during the summer!
Field Day Station Test
It’s almost time for the 2016 Field Day Event and we’ve been in high gear getting ready. We will be setting up at the Hollis-Brookline High School in Hollis this year. The Featured image for this article shows a satellite view of the site. We have already held two Field Day Planning Meetings and many club members have volunteered to help with our Field Day Operation for this year. You can read the latest about our Field Day plans in the Field Day Forum here on our site. Our club was very active in WRT2014 and we were able to purchase several of the WRTC station and tower kits from that effort.
In preparation for Field Day each year, we like to set up our station kit in our backyard to verify that all of our equipment is ready and in good working order. The first step is always to pitch the wall tent from the WRTC kit. The tent and the associated tables/chairs can comfortably hold 3 – 4 people.
We will be using the new IC-7300 Transceiver for Field Day this year. As you can see from the pictures from last year, we used an Elecraft KX3 Transceiver in 2015 along with an outboard KXPA100 100W Amplifier to bring the station up to 100W and Elecraft’s PX3 Panadapter. The either of these combinations makes a great 100W Field Day Station as does any good 100W transceiver that can be operated from 13.8Vdc power.
We’ve also used a Behringer HA400 four channel headphone amplifier (the unit on the right on top of the power supply) with our Field Day setup. This enables connection of a total of 4 sets of headphones to the station – one for the operator, one for a logger and two more pairs for folks to listen in on the fun. Our club has been doing a great deal of outreach to encourage new HAMs to join the hobby and we built this setup so that some of the new folks can listen in on our operation more easily. We will be using a Heil Pro 7 headset to operate and we will have 3 sets of Heil Pro Set 3 headphones for others to use. The Heil gear is very comfortable, light weight and sound great over the air.
We will again be using the N1MM+ Logger for Field Day. It is very easy to set up N1MM+ to work with the IC-7300 or the KX3. We will be doing an N1MM+ demo and training at our June Tech Night session to help others in our club to get going on the N1MM+ logger.
One of the many great aspects of Field Day is that it requires those who participate to test their emergency equipment and field operating skills each year. Our club has a large generator and power distribution system that we all share for Field Day. We use our station test session as a reason to get our smaller generators out for a test run. We have a pair of Honda EU2000 generators which can be used together to generate quite a bit of power.
Our club has quite a bit of antenna equipment and we will be putting up two 40 ft towers and tri-band beams with Triplexes and Filters for our 20m, 15m and 10m SSB and CW stations. We are planning a 40m Delta Loop array for our club to use for 40m and we’ll also be putting up 40m and 80m inverted-V and dipole antennas.
I hope that everyone in our club will join in on the Field Day fun again this year.
Fred, AB1OC
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