2013 Field Day
Bob, W7BKN and I along with the help of my grandson Charlie put K7AUO on the air from Ocean Park again this year. Trimming tree branches to get enough clearance for the beam to rotate cost us some setup time and the 43’ vertical which has gone up fairly easy in the past got away from us a couple of times hitting me in the head once and breaking my glasses. Bob put a lot of effort in setting up wav files to provide help with CQ calls and reports but we got reports of audio distortion when using the microphone directly so we had to take the laptop out of the path. As usual Bob operated CW on the graveyard shift and we shared SSB operation at other times. We logged 418 QSOs,up from 411 last year and didn’t have too much trouble receiving in spite of the very impressive operation W7RDR puts on about a half mile from our location. We are hoping to find a new location next year free from interfering trees and other FD operations. Chuck K7BVT
Bob
Chuck
Charlie
tower trailer
2013 7QP
Operators this year were Chuck, K7BVT; Joe, AE7LD; and Bob, W7BKN. We had a better operating position than last year. Our friend, Don Williamson, has a shop a couple of buildings from where we were the last couple of years. He let us use his new, not yet in service, paint booth, for our operation. Much better set-up and no 100’ extension cords! See photos of the operating position, and the area.
The good news: We took GilliamCounty! The bad news: we were only second in our category, Multi-Operator, Single Transmitter, SingleCounty, Expedition. We won our category last year. This year the categories have been expanded to include single county and county-line expedition categories. 7QP13-K7AUO 7QP13-K7AUO-2
Should the winner be a stationary target, not likely, we are well within the realm of what is reasonable to get back the title. We had some kind of logging issue that lost us enough contacts to make the difference between first and second place. We are still analyzing this issue. In addition just a few CW and/or Digital contacts would make the difference. As they say, “Just wait until next year.”
Look for soapbox comments from W7BKN near the bottom of the page at:
http://ws7n.net/7QP/new/Page.asp?Content=START&Page=4
Look for our score under, 7th Area Single-County Expedition Multi-Single, near the bottom of the page at:
http://ws7n.net/7QP/new/Page.asp?Content=START&Page=2
Bob, W7BKN
2012 Field Day
K7AUO operated from Ocean Park again this year, 1B Western Washington WWA. This has been a good year for mosquitoes there, plentiful, large, and aggressive. The trailer mounted tower & beam went up relatively smoothly but heavy rain complicated setup of the 80/40 dipole. Both antennas and the operating position were setup for the Saturday morning Field Day start. We made a number of contacts on 15 meters as the band was open on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. We made over 400 contacts, not bad for two old farts. Chuck, K7BVT
2012 7QP Gilliam County
K7AUO won the Multi-Single Expedition category as well as the coveted first place for Gilliam county in the 7th call area QSO party (7QP) this year. We operated from the abandoned radar base near the
town of Condon in Gilliam County, Oregon. Our attempt to evaluate our new 40 meter vertical was somewhat thwarted
by a high noise level on that band. Our refurbished AL-811H worked well. We made 711 contacts this year, more than double the 298 contacts we made from the same location last year. Operators: Bob W7BKN, Chuck K7BVT, Joe AE7LD,
Phil W7PYX. The weather was great: while we tore down and packed up on Sunday, cold, wet and windy the rest of the time.
We hope to participate again next year. A picture of the plaque that TERAC was awarded for First Place 7th-Area County Expedition Multi-Single.
Bob W7BKN, Chuck K7BVT
