High Sierra Field Day Group

Field Day 2006 is over now, and after having some problems finding a site we had a great Field Day! The new site was above Sonora in the Stanislaus National Forest. This year it was hot, and due to the late rains the mosquitos were a bit thick, but we set up and had a good Field Day. Mike WA6ZTY set up a bobtail curtain for 40m, we put up Glenn WB6W’s 2 element steppir at about 50 feet, and various other dipoles etc. The trees at this site are a bit shorter than we’re used to, most in the 50-75 foot range. I used the CSV17 launcher for this, and had to run the pressure way down to avoid overshooting too many trees.

We had some minor problems with the Access Point and went over to the backup, but the main one was working when tested later, so it must have needed a rest…

The FDLog program worked well, and the new Q editor was lauded for convenience. More improvements are on the way already.

We had some noise from battery chargers and generators that we’ll have to look into next year more carefully.

We used Mike K3MC’s Hercules solid state 500w amp. It broke through some of the pileups and made some for us. It did give some problems to at least one other rig with apparent overloading, but other rigs did not seem to mind.

The bands were a bit tough, and the Bobtail didn’t seem to be working quite right so the overall Q count was a bit lower than usual, but it was fun and as always we learned a few new things.

Next year perhaps we’ll have built some lightweight monoband beams, and a Spiderbeam to try out. The bugs will be worked out of the Bobtail.

Frank and Eric (and Glenn) did a lot of research and driving, and located a new site in Stanislaus National Forest at about 6000 feet elevation. We’ll be departing early Thursday to make the 3.5 hour trip (more with the trailer). See you on the air! We’ll be using Glenn’s call this year, WB6W. It loooks like we’ll have about 14 people attending our group campout this year.

What a year! The El Dorado National Forest is our usual Field Day destination, but this year they are really messed up! Our usual places are all NO VEHICLES ALLOWED due to some legal SNAFUs they are dealing with. Seems that some people don’t want the National Forests to be used anymore except on foot. (I thought we had National Parks for that?)

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