From the shack of Jeramie (W6LND), Secretary of the Glenn Amateur Radio Society (GARS):
On Thursday June 20, 2024 myself W6LND, AG6VA, KK6FNY, KN6WSN and the rest of family arrived and setup the early campsite. I hung up my 80M homemade EFHW antenna it worked fairly well buy I personally was plagued by radio issues most of the weekend. I did successfully make a POTA activation on Friday the 21 of June and that was my heaviest radio operating of the weekend.
Field Day started to become real in the afternoon of the 21st when N6UTV and WB1G arrived as well as most of the membership KF6OBI, KC6UIS, and KV6OTT. They started assembling the 80M loop antenna brought by N6UTV and it was the star of Field Day antenna wise it performed very well on all bands. KN6MGK and K6CFP also set up antennas and they performed well. KN6MGK mentioned he was not really happy with his OCF Dipole he had up he says next year he will have something else.
I setup a Starlink internet satellite system and it worked well but we were getting RFI interference. We found the 2000-Watt Redodo Sine Wave Inverter was putting out some noise. We moved over to my Jackey for a short time and that removed the interference. Then we settled on using the very impressive Eco flow system Bob KC6UIS had brought up with approx. 4kW of battery power and 400 watts of Solar that system successfully operated our Starlink and a 12V refrigeration device as well as charge numerous portable devices for the majority of the weekend.
Tyler, Miriam, Smitty, Ryan, and Courtney provided excellent food for all the entirety of the weekend although it seems to me, they were fully strained by the cooking duties and moving forward next year I would like to see a more simplified menu meal plan to free up their time moving forward.
Field day wise we had great success and I look forward to us building on this year’s successful event moving forward. We had a grand total of 204 contacts CW, Digital, and Phone (Summary Below)! I believe that the Starlink system was a great tool it allowed us to use our phones and make voice, video, and text calls from a dead zone in the middle of nowhere. It also made a great LAN for networking the windows laptops we had available with the N3FJP logging software the club owns. We had all 4 computers networked and we used the N6UTV laptop as our server it performed well.
Moving forward with Field Day events into the future I would like to improve our computer hardware be that having the DRT available as a server or a more robust laptop as a server. I do believe had the DRT been on site it would have seen no use due the temperatures we experienced much like last year at Kingsley Glade. I personally prefer in nice conditions to be outside in the shade operating. I would also like to see a second antenna system that could perform as well as the 80M loop antenna did maybe a hex beam or a beam antenna for more DX contacts. Our strongest showing was on 40M in my opinion our strongest band should be 20M.