VHF UHF Summer Field Day 2011

Congratulation to the VK3ER Club Team for taking out First place in the Multi operator, 24 Hour section. A hotly contested section. Link to Results page.

Looking at the current weather pattern it was difficult to imaging that the weekend of January 15-16 was to be dry. With all of the flooding in VK2, VK3 and VK4 going on, weather conditions at Mclaughlans Lookout in the Wombat State Forest were perfect.

Mike VK3AVV, Max VK3WT and Peter VK3QI arrived onsite Friday afternoon to commence setting up the station. They were followed by Jack VK3WWW late on Saturday morning. By the time VK3WWW arrived the antennas were all erected except for the 2m array. At the last contest in December 2010 the 2m FM antennas were basically inoperable and during the off time they were checked and re-tuned. I knew there was something up when tuning the antennas I was able to obtain an SWR of 1.0-1 on both of the phased pairs even after I changed the patch lead the SWR remained the same. Well, in situ using the club analyser the SWR was through the roof. Max and Jack spent quite some time trying to bring the SWR down to a level where the TX and Amp would not complain. Eventually this was accomplished and around 20 minutes after the contest start time the 2m antennas were on air.

Band conditions were quite good and there seemed to be some lift (troppo) about. All of the stations were working well including the VKCL Logging program that was networked between the 6m, 2m and 70cm bands. VKCL was also operating on the Microwave Bands but due to the fact that Peter's TS2000 was being used at the microwave IF source it would be difficult to display which band he was on at any time.

Late Saturday afternoon Ralph VK3LL arrived with his nice camera and wireless mike. He persuaded Peter to attach the mike and take him on a tour of the VK3ER/P setup. I have seen parts of the resulting video and what I have seen so far it gives an excellent insight into how we setup and operate our portable station. A topic for a furture post to the web site.

Sunday morning Steve VK3QW and Bob VK3XP turned up to see how things were going. VK3ER/p would like to thank both of them for hanging around and assisting with the packing up. We have the packing up down pat but even so, it still takes roughly 2.5 hours to totally disassemble the station.

For this field day to promote the microwave bands the contest manager had added another section called “microwave challenge” for this section you take your best contact from each microwave band.

Thanks to all of you who came up on air and handed out numbers to stations operating in the contest. Our next outing will be the John Moyle Memorial Field Day over the weekend19th-20th March 2011. For this event the club will operate from Mount Cowley in the Otway Ranges.

Cheers, VK3WWW Jack for VK3ER/P