View of Field Day setup with antenna on top of parking garage.
As with last year, my Field Day plans for 2025 were with my workplace club, The Waypoint Amateur Radio Club (WA0RC), where we set up a portable Field Day operation for the first time in over a decade (before I worked here)! As Vice President of the club, I took it on myself to be Field Day coordinator with the help of a very motivated and capable Field Day Committee.
Our plan was to be a 2A KS station set up on the first floor of the company’s parking garage with our main antenna on the third story of the parking garage. We ran 100 watts from our Alinco SR-8T and Yaesu FT-991a into a 40-6m fan dipole in an inverted vee on my 25 foot drive-on mast. With that antenna, we had a triplexer and bandpass filter arrangement so we could use any two of 20m, 15m, and 10m at the same time on the two radios. We also had a Buddistick antenna in the grass on the ground as a planned backup antenna that ended up being used almost continuously for 20m.
We had a steady flow of people throughout the afternoon and early evening culminating in a potluck dinner. It was great to see so many club members and some of their friends and family come join us. Some stayed past midnight when it was just the club president and me until 8am or 9am in the morning.
All in all, we had 21 participants get on the air with 174 digital (FT8), 25 CW, and 106 phone contacts and a claimed score of 1,008:
- 40m: 20 digital, 15 CW, and 84 phone contacts
- 20m: 99 digital, 10 CW, and 100 phone contacts
- 10m: 29 digital contacts
- 6m: 26 digital contacts
We claimed a bonuses for 100% emergency power thanks to a trusty 2000W generator borrowed from a club member and web submission to the ARRL. We nearly doubled our 2024 score which isn’t particularly impressive given we went from one radio in 2024 to two in 2025, but given the other factors of this year’s Field Day, I still call it a major success.
View of operating positions on first floor of parking garage.
In terms of lessons learned, the antenna set up was fairly painful because the fan dipole had not been tuned before we had to set up. After spending several hours on getting things set up and tuning, we eventually just called it good enough without having every band under 2:1 SWR. We had to play a lot with the angle of the inverted vee as well just due to the mast and location the antenna was located.
This difficulty further solidified my opinion that fan dipoles are not a good option for portable operations. While they can work fine for a permanent installation, the interaction between elements makes tuning in the field hard, different for each location/setup, and time consuming. Additionally, they are very heavy compared to single-band dipoles (my mast couldn’t go to full height because of the weight and wind load). We also planned to use the fan dipole as a single antenna for both stations by way of triplexer and bandpass filters but that becomes complicated and expensive, and meant that if we wanted to use 40m or 6, we had to remove the triplexer and could only use the antenna on one radio anyway. Personally, I much prefer a doublet antenna (twinlead-fed dipole cut to the lowest band of interest) as they are just as multi-banded without the tuning and weight issues of the fan dipole. Of course, they require a wide-range tuner and twinlead can be difficult to deal with when there are walls to be crossed, but I have had very good luck with these on Field Day in the past where we can connect the twinlead to the tuner directly without having to worry about going into a building. I will encourage the club to move this direction next year (or try some other ideas) as well as plan for a better performing second antenna for the other radio such as an 40-10m EFHW. The Buddistick worked great for what it is, but there was no reason we had to have such a compromised antenna. But we didn’t know how it would go ahead of time or if we’d even have both stations running that much of the time!
Even with the antenna troubles, I was really pleased with how this Field Day went considering last years’ was in the shack. We had a great turnout, a number of active operators, and a tasty cookout dinner. I even got plenty of time on the radio (rare when you’re the one spearheading planning). We had some club members make their first HF contacts which is makes it all worthwhile to me.
Last year’s Field Day was a simple reboot attempt for the club after not doing Field Day for many years by using the club shack station. This year served as our first attempt at doing Field Day in the field since the club revitalization post-COVID. Perhaps next year we will venture off the company grounds for a more “field” experience, but I think that even repeating the same setup with some tweaks would be a fantastic time.
I must also say I’m very grateful our employer let us set up and stay for the 24 hour period; I know that sort of support for employee clubs is rare. A parking garage is a cool structure to use since it gave us protection from the sun with plenty of height for our antenna. Plus bathrooms, showers, and coffee weren’t too far away!