What is Field Day you ask? Field Day is an emergency preparedness event sponsored by the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League). It encourages amateur radio operators to leave the comfort of their homes, and setup a radio station with limited time and operate for 24 hours. The event is run in the form of a contest where the object is to work as many other stations as possible while meeting various contrived conditions for extra bonus points. More than 35,000 amateur radio operators participate each year. The skills learned and practiced during these events are then applied to real emergency situations during natural disasters. Many of you remember the massive Oakland fires a few years back. Amateur radio operators were instrumental in providing communications during those fires and that is just one of thousands of emergency situations amateur radio operators have participated in.

It has been a long time since I've participated and I decided to have a little camping fun and to give it a go this year. I found a location near Lobdell Lake with the help of Dave. We scouted the area a few weeks prior to determine its suitability. It has been a long time since I did this and according to this very web page, it was 2001. You can find a few photos of that year at this link.

The graph above is of my QSO rate. A QSO is a contact with another radio operator. As you can see my peak rate was on 80 Meters (3.5 Mhz) at 06:00 UTC (11pm PST) when I was working about one station per minute. I brought equipment and three antennas to operate on five different bands. The following pages contain pictures and videos I made shortly before and during the event. This year was particularly challenging as Dave needed to go to L.A. and Andra was in Sacramento. This meant I had to figure out how to build everything solo.

Enjoy the photos and video clips.