Two years ago, Jan, ON1JV, invited me to join a fieldday-event with the UBA Geraardsbergen club. I accepted since it was a chance to finally meet my CW-tutor Peter, ON5XY! A lot of water has flowed through the Dender, and with a mix-up and confusion of work and other commitments, it finally happened this time! Navigation programmed to the field-location in Idegem, car registered for the LEZ in Brussels (just in case I had to divert), and off I went for the 2 hour drive.
The weather wasn’t fantastic. In the afternoon during build-up of the antennas, there was a torrential rain, slowing down the work. The shack was ready. The EFHW for 20 and up was ready for action and the whisker-antenna for 160/80/40 needed some final tuning. The location was neatly next to the Dender-river at the outer-skirts of Idegem, near Geraardsbergen.
The power came from a genny which fed 2 UPS batteries, each battery good for 15 hours of operation.
The radio was an Icom IC7300, hooked up to a laptop running N1MM. Peter, ON5XY, built a nice cluster-tool to show the for the contest interesting stations. I brought my propagation-tracker tool. An additional screen was used to run the CWget decoder as decoding-tool for visitors and CW-students who wanted to try a bit of contesting.
15:00UTC came and time to start, but…. no CAT connection between PC and radio, despite everything tested and working beforehand. Oh well, the usual contest misery issues, but they didn’t dampen the team-spirit the least. After all, field-days are also meant as preparedness exercise for when real disaster strikes, and this was a good exercise to figure out what was wrong.
Operating and tutoring was divided between ON1JV, ON5XY, ON8AC and myself, and the rest-times were spent in the communal tent, with a lovely barbeque and more delicious food, taken care off by Amy.
Other issues showed up as well. The UPS batteries were suspectable to RFI causing them to disconnect when using the EFHW on 20m and up, killing the power to the radio and external screens and my laptop. We ended up removing them from the powerline and reverted to genny-power. When the genny ran out of fuel, the power dropped again. Later on when the genny was refuelled with the last fuel, we put the batteries further away from the antenna, and reconnected them and had no more problems with them.
Now losing power doesn’t seem a problem, but it caused issues with the way how the cluster-tool was connected to the radio and N1MM (via VSPE), and my propagation-tracker loosing connection with the RBN-server. So Peter and I need to make some improvement in the recovery of our software in case SHTF.
Conditions weren’t really good. This contest is a regional contest so a lot of DX wasn’t expected (only 3 W’s as DX), but a lot of European activity. It sounded like every ham in G/GM/GW/GI/GU and DL were active, hi. 10 meter was good for only 2 contacts since the MUF stayed around 20MHz over the weekend. We ended with 150k+ points and 549 unique QSO’s.
Nevertheless, it was a great weekend, with a strong team-spirit in the UBA Geraardsbergen club where everybody was involved in making this a great field-day outing.