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Winter Field Day this winter is January 28-29, 2023.
Cindy and I have rented a cabin at the Doctor’s Creek Unit at the Cooper Lake State Park at Jim Chapman Lake for Friday the 27th thru Sunday the 29th.
We welcome the club members to come down and join us. We plan to have one HF station and something modest on VHF. You can use our equipment or bring your own.
If you want to spend the night in our cabin, Cindy and I will use two of the beds, leaving two bunk beds unused, you can see them here:
There is one more enclosed cabin currently available if anyone is interested, plus there are also screened shelters however it might get a bit brisk in late January. The enclosed cabins have air conditioning and heating. You could come in your own RV camper, there is electricity at the RV sites.
Come on out, get on the air and have fun!
73,
Charles WA5VHU
I am planning on attending this. My plan is to bring a RV and stay in it, however, I would like to work from around the same location as everyone else if possible. We can work on details as it gets closer. I am looking forward to going.
Mark,
Great, I look forward to seeing you out there! We are in cabin 2, shown in red in the picture. I don’t know how busy they are in January, probably not too much, but you might want to reserve a spot ahead of time. If you want to come down they will let you go in and look at the spots without paying the entrance fee.
73
Charles,
Thanks for the post and for doing this! I am going to be smack in the middle of my January-February process to get my FAA medical restored in March, so we won’t be able to make it this time around. However, we might be interested the next time. We have also discussed hosting it at our place, but that will have to wait until my situation is resolved, so maybe 2024. Thanks again for making the post and we hope you get some more takers!
Take care,
Phillip
Hmmmm.
Looks like I need to get to work building out the port-a-cabinet for my “Field Day Portable” CW station. 20m or 40m look to be my target bands — 40m preferred. If it works out, it’ll be “old school”. No tubes, but no auto-tuners either.
I was able to get the special call sign of W5W for our 2023 Winter Field Day event so all are welcome to use it out at the Doctor’s Creek Unit at the Cooper Lake State Park at Jim Chapman Lake!
That’s “Whiskey Five Whiskey”.
I will be setting up a WiFi router to try to network our computers together like we do at summer Field Day for logging. I don’t know if we can make the path between us but we can try. The software really cuts down on the duplicate contacts and annoying the other folks.
Charles WA5VHU
Danial,
Are you coming out to the lake for Winter Field Day? If so, we might want to coordinate things.
Here are the antennas we plan to use. Cindy and I will operate two stations, one capable of HF 40 thru 6 meters, the other one capable of 160 thru 2 meters.
Due to the closeness of the antennas we will definitely need to make use of the bandpass filters!
The picture shows the locations of the antennas.
The MFJ-1796 HF vertical antenna will operate from 40 thru 6 meters and will be on a 15′ mast for a total height of about 27′.
The wire antenna on top of the trees (via slingshot) will cover 160 thru 6 meters, tuned by a SGC-237 coupler.
The 2 meter horizontal antenna will be a Big Wheel and will be up about 15′ to 20′ mounted on a pole.
The 2m/70cm vertical omni is a mobile whip for talking to the area repeaters (or direct FM contacts) and is mounted to the top of the pole the 2m horizontal antenna is on.
73,
Charles WA5VHU
Power at Winter Field Day form the rules:
Alternative Power (1): You may claim 500 points if no commercial power is used in powering your WFD station. This means any power not connected to the commercial power grid. Generators, batteries, solar power, and wind are all possible sources of alternative power. You may claim this bonus no matter what operational category you are working under.
(1) To claim the Alternative Power bonus, batteries in use may only be recharged using alternate power. When not in use, batteries may be charged by any means available. WFD operations claiming the alternate power bonus must run all station equipment and accessories from an alternate power source, with the exception of the logging-only computer which may be connected to the power grid or any power source available.
We are planning on running our W5W stations from my EV vehicle, so we will be battery powered.
Any other station using the W5W call will have to be operating from Alternative Power for W5W to qualify for the bonus points.
What are the other stations coming to Winter Field Day using for power? If need be, I have two small generators I can loan however the park does have quiet hours, I think 10 PM to 6 or 8 AM.
The way I read the rules, you can pre-charge a battery from AC mains or whatever but while actually using the battery you can not charge it from AC mains, only the listed Alternative Power sources, such as solar, etc.
Please let me know your intentions.
73,
Charles WA5VHU
I plan to use an EFHW 40-6 for my antenna. I will get it up in the air as high as possible and make a go of it. I will use my battery box for power. Unfortunately, my generator is down at the moment, so, I will have to recharge while sleeping, or borrow one.
Looking forward to it,
Mark W5PTX
I have two small Honda quiet inverter generators, a 1,000 and a 2,000 watt unit. The 1,000 watt should be able to charge your battery, depending on the charger. I can bring the generator, you will have to run it during the day and rely on your battery after the 10:00 PM quiet time.
That should keep you going on Alternative Power.
Or,
If you think your battery will last you through Saturday and will then charge enough while you sleep to get you through Sunday you won’t need the generator.
I think I will plan on bringing the little generator anyway, plus my house is only 11 minutes away if we need something else.
Charles WA5VHU
All,
Charles Penry (WA5VHU), the Club Field Day Coordinator, is at work today, so he asked for an assist on this post.
Here is the link to a PDF flyer that he has produced. Please click the link, read the material, print it out if you wish and then go do something fun!
As he put it, please go to the Club meeting Saturday morning, get some lunch and then head down and join in the Winter Field Day activities with, at a minimum, Charles, Cindy (KD5CCB) and Mark Johnson (W5PTX).
73
Phillip
The 2023 Winter Field Day log has been submitted, info below:
Callsign W5W
Name Charles Penry
Club RED RIVER VALLEY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB (W5W)
Location NTX
Exchange 3I
Claimed Score 3124
Raw QSOs 203
Op Hours 11.8
Received (UTC) 2/28/2023 5:11
The map showing the contact areas:
The results for Winter Field Day are in!
We came in 719th place out of 4,662 submittals. I think that is not too bad, it puts us just above the top 15% if I did my math correctly.
A big thank you to all the club members that came out and help made this happen this year, you know who you are!
73 and see you out there again next year!
Charles WA5VHU
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