This year's Field Day was a great success! Thanks to the hard work of our President, Joe (AA4BZ) and Event Coordinator, Tim (AA4SS), we received permission from K-Mart to set up our tents and trailers on the West end of their huge parking lot, a great spot to expose our activities to the public.

Two large travel trailers were set up at opposite ends of the lot to house our three main stations. On the South end of the lot, a large diesel generator (thanks Bill! KD1Q) powered the CW trailer and kept our key pounding ops comfortable. On the North end, Glenn (KD4ULB) provided the trailer and generator that kept our digital and SSB stations operating around the clock.

Joe (AA4BZ) and Thurston (W6NY) took turns hunting and pouncing on every CW op they could find through most of the night and well into the next afternoon for a total of over 600 stations.

Tim (AA4SS) started off the event on the SSB station working multiple bands and helping to raise our overall score.

The digital station was a new effort for this year, provided by our Digital Modes expert Glenn (KD4ULB). Operating primarily RTTY and PSK, Murphy's law seemed to be lurking around every corner. Even after several software bugs were worked out, a gamma match short on the tri-band beam kept causing the transmitter to shut down due to excessive SWR. Only about 80 contacts were made on 20M but many valuable lessons were learned for next year's effort (like a back up antenna!).