This year’s ARRL Field Day was a great success. The club set up at the Wings on String Kite Field near Jamestown Reservoir. We ran two stations (ND0JL & ND0TS) for the entire 24 hour period, operating using the club call, W0FX. We also had another club member (AD0ND) that set up at his residence using off-grid power, which will count toward the commutative score for the club.
At the Field Day set up, we completed a total of 235 phone contacts. We were not able to connect to all 50 states, as there were some that were very elusive. Others on the bands seemed to also be having trouble finding contacts in certain states. Some of the states that we did not get were just due to the propagation conditions.
The club member that was set up at his residence completed a total of 303 digital contacts and one phone contact (which counted for both of us as a ND contact).
The weather was a great temperature, but we could have asked for a little less wind. Even though we endured high winds most of the time, none of the antennas were affected by it. The operated flawlessly. It actually got down into the 50’s, overnight. The highs during the day were in the mid 70’s. Because of the high winds, the grill was never fired up. We really didn’t have any visitors around dinner time, so we just cooked up some burgers in the RV, later Saturday evening, so we could sustain ourselves through the night.
We were visited by quite a few individuals, and we really enjoyed visiting with everybody! As we were setting up we had a couple has from Devil’s Lake stop by. They we planning on visiting multiple Field Day sites on Saturday. We also had other amateur radio operators stop by, as well as elected officials.
