Reservoir Park Field Day

The last time I operated Field Day was with my college radio club back in the 70's. Since I've lately been doing these bicycle portable operations for the CWT's (CWOPS mini-contests), it was easy enough to do a quick Field Day operation. Just a kilometer up the hill from my home QTH is a big grassy park on top of a large reservoir, one of the highest spots in town. "Ground" level there is higher than the top of my 70 foot tower.

Madison Water Utility Reservoir Site

Except for the concrete structures on each end, you would never know there was 6 mllion gallons of water right under the clearing.

Inside the Reservoir

I've done a couple CWT's from there with my simple 40 meter half wave, and the RBN reports have always looked pretty good.  

Bicycle Mobile Station, with Furniture

Because there's no shelter or tables up there, I had to take it all along. That included a folding table and chair, and the sun shade and poles we use for Wisconsin River canoe trips. It all made the bike a bit wobbly, but it was a short ride. Somewhere amidst all that stuff is the 11 meter carbon fiber fishing pole for the antenna.

One of the good things about the lack of amenities up there is that the park isn't heavily used, even on weekends. I wasn't disturbed for the 6 hours I was there. Who knows, though, what will happen when they get around to looking at the surveillance camera video.

Sun Shade 

I was up there shortly after sunrise, 5:30 AM, and quickly got the shelter and antenna up. Total setup and tear down time was probably about an hour, something to be said for simplicity. I chose to just operate for a few hours Sunday morning, in hopes that there would still be plenty of activity, but the competition wouldn't be quite so fierce. It turned out, things were rather slow, so perhaps Saturday afternoon would have been better. In any case, I had decided to operate until either one of the batteries went dead, or things got boring.

Antenna Support

Besides the elevation, another nice thing about this spot is that the trees keep their distance, perhaps allowing a bit more RF to escape. (You just can't have tree roots growing down into the reservoir.)

The antenna, as usual, is my 40 meter half wave, end fed, and supported about 1/4 way from the far end, like a lopsided inverted V. I use a little homebrew tuner designed for the high impedance, which works on 40, 20, and 15 meters. The radio is an Elecraft KX2, with its excellent receiver. This time, because it was such a short ride, I brought my ancient netbook for logging, though it can't do rig control or CW. This leads to somewhat more that my usual number of QLF moments, but it's better than paper dupe sheets.

Conditions were fairly good, with even some sporadic E skip on 15, but after a bit less than 5 hours the rate was just too slow to be interesting. I did get a few answers to CQ's, nothing one could call a run, but what can you expect with 5 Watts and a little chunk of wire? By the time I quit, the netbook had about an hour's worth of battery left, but the KX2 was going strong.  (And I had some spare batteries for it.)  When I packed everything up, there were 207 contacts in the log.

If I do it again next year, I'll take my chances with the competition on Saturday afternoon.