Field Day 2020

This year was a strange reintroduction to Field Day, being the first FD event I've participated in since roughly 1985. COVID-19 prevented a group outing so I went it alone with a Yaesu FT-891, Wolf River Coils telescoping vertical (Sunday I used a MyAntennas EFLW), and 20Ah LiFePo4 battery.

Despite the sub-optimal band conditions, challenging weather, and lack of company, it was still a blast. I operated SSB to keep it simple this year. After giving up on 20m QRP Saturday afternoon and switching to 40m and 100 watts, I racked up a mediocre 50+ QSOs while marveling at the performance of the FT-891. The digital noise reduction and variable bandwidth filters made the difference between QSO and no-QSO many times. It's a nice rig.

Other random thoughts on FD-2020:  

• Very few on air spats or snarky comments heard.
• There were lots of polite "thank you" and "good luck in the contest" comments peppered into exchanges. 
• I heard a goodly amount of slow and medium speed code, helpful for people building (and rebuilding) their CW skills.
  

Other than limited propagation and the usual poorly tuned amplifiers producing QRM on nearby frequencies, the event was enjoyable. Hopefully next year we can deploy in groups.

Back in the Hobby

I've been an Amateur Radio licensee since the mid-1980s, and an Extra Class licensee since the mid-to-late 1980s. It was a huge amount of fun then: There were sunspots, I was young and it was all new, and the used equipment -- which was what we could afford -- was still relatively simple to understand.

As happens with so many people, however, school and life intervened. The hobby fell by the wayside as other things took priority. I never let my license lapse, though, and late last year was finally able to reenter the hobby, 30 years later.

What a time it is to be a ham! The commercial radios nowadays are technological masterpieces, and there is much innovation and experimentation with home brew, which now includes SDR and DSP. The Internet, which didn't exist when I was previously active, provides a tremendous amount of information to anyone who cares to learn and connectivity to communities of common interest.

As I was becoming inactive there was a lot of talk by gadflies about how the hobby was in decline and how young people didn't care about code or the technical dimensions of radio. None of that concern turned out to be true. Look at publications such as QEX and the QRP Quarterly; those and others reveal a group of highly technical hams. There's even a resurgence of CW operation as new and innovative digital modes emerge.

The hobby is, at its core, alive and well.

I'll blog from time to time whenever something crosses my mind that seems relevant. Hope to meet you on the air soon.