For Field Day this year, I participated in the Waypoint Amateur Radio Club, WA0RC, operations from the club shack. WA0RC is the club of Garmin employees in Olathe, Kansas, and has a new, dedicated shack space that was just opened earlier this year. We previously had a small station setup in the corner of a stairwell, but in the remodel, we were able to move next door to what was previously a small mechanical room.
As getting the shack up and running has been a task for the first half of this year, we decided to run Field Day from the shack as a 1D station. As Vice President of the club, I took it on myself to set up the Field Day operation as a way of encouraging more club members to get familiar with the new station while we continue to rebuild club activity after COVID. We simply created a schedule with hour-long slots and had people sign up and come in as they wanted to operate.
Our station has a Yaesu FT-991, Alinco SR8T, and Kenwood TM-733 with two operating positions with their own PCs. From an antenna perspective, we currently have a 40m/20/15m/10m fan dipole and 2m/70cm J-Pole on top of the two-story building part of the Garmin campus. It is a modest station, but one we have been able to have quite a bit of fun with.
I was quite pleased with how the operation turned out in the end. We had people signed up to be on the air for something like 16 of the 24 hours, and several new hams came along to experience their first Field Day. I had two coworkers come meet me, one an intern and both of which had not been on HF before, and I helped them make several contacts each. I made a few contacts myself as well on 20m and 40m phone.
All in all, we had 10 participants get on the air with 67 Digital and 170 Phone contacts and a claimed score of 608:
- 80m: Seven 80m digital contacts
- 40m: 29 digital and 11 phone contacts
- 20m: 26 digital and 100 phone contacts
- 15m: 5 digital and 59 phone contacts