I did not do great in the contest, from a points perspective. It will be very easy to improve upon, especially as my CQ-ear tunes in further.
But – Field Day is only somewhat of a contest. Depending on whom you ask (or watch, or operate with), it might be slightly more, or significantly more, or almost completely, a Disaster Preparedness Exercise.
Given that I was operating from my permanent station, permanent antennas, and commercial power, I was really only drilling on being the “other station”… the guy who was not just hit with a disaster, but who might be handling some traffic for/from someone who was.
Anyway, here’s where it went well: if you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve been tweaking this and adjusting that, and fiddling around with the things needed to be dialed in so as to be ready for Field Day. The day before the event, I spent over an hour just going to all the bands, using each of my 2 antennas, tuning to the center of the CW sub-band, and writing down the approximate dial positions (two variable capacitors and a 12-position inductor switch) which achieved my best SWR… so that when I decided to switch bands during the contest, I could save some time getting set up on the next band.
What I had not done, was ever run this radio above 5 watts on several of the bands… had only cranked it up to the maximum 25W (for CW, or 100W on SSB) on 40-meters. Once the contest got rolling, in the early afternoon, it was clear that the hottest action was on 20-meters. So I got tuned up, cranked it up to max output power, and called the other guy. And all the software seized up! Shut it all off, reboot, start it up, try again. Same thing. Clearly, I had some RF-into-PC problem at moderate power which I had not experienced way down in the QRP neighborhood.
So my Disaster Preparedness Exercise was changing to an entirely different PC, which only had a couple of the software packages on it, outdated, not configured for Field Day. I basically re-did all the things I had done over the past week, in just under 90 minutes. Lucky for me, I had put all the latest installation downloads into my Dropbox HAM/Win10/ folder, so I didn’t have to go hunting for them all.
And it all worked. Even at max power. That’s a success.
