Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club
Field Day 2003

SBARC Has Another Great Field Day !
By : Tom Saunders, N6YX

The SBARC Field Day Team did a great job this year. SBARC Field Day was held on the top of Eling's Park. The callsign of K6TZ was used for all stations except for the Get On The Air (GOTA) Station that used the KF6DI callsign. SBARC ran as a 3A designation. This indicates a club station with three HF transmitters not counting GOTA.

Field Day Setup began Friday morning. Jug, WA6MBZ, moved the generator trailer from DRI to Eling's Park. Jug also picked up the tables and chairs. Al Soenke, WA6VNN, brought the antenna trailer. Bob Levinson, K6CZD, brought the SBARC Communications Van from the fire station.

Gary d'Engle, KG6MKQ, used his weed eater to clear weeds and grass for the stations and equipment. Steve Long, AC6T, assembled the Force 12 antennas that were used in the phone and CW stations. The following members also participated in station setup : John Butera, KE6DIE, Rod Fritz, KB9KMO, Steve Hammer, KG6ENA, Dennis Jones, K6RCL, Ken Mueller, KG6JMJ, Darryl Widman, KF6DI, and Mike Ziebell, AE6MZ. Setup consisted of erecting shelters for each station, antenna assembly, running power and signal cables, and erecting antenna towers.

Field Day operation began at 11 Saturday morning. The station captains were:

• CW : Jug, WA6MBZ and Steve Long, AC6T
• GOTA : Darryl Widman, KF6DI
• Phone : Steve Hammer, KG6ENA and Ken Mueller, KG6JMJ
• Digital : Tom Saunders, N6YX

Thanks to Ken Mueller, Steve Hammer, and Darryl, the Field Day event got more attention this year. The Field Day Site was visited by the Mayor of Santa Barbara, Marty Blum. We were also interviewed by KEYT Television and the Independent.

Radio propagation conditions were worse than last year. This is due to the decline in the sunspot cycle. Fortunately this was known in advance and propagation predictions were run on a computer program. The program indicated that 15 meters may be open at times, 20 meters open, 40 meters open in the evening, and 80 meters at night. This presented a challenge of how to run three or four transmitters on the same band and in the same general area without interfering with one another. One of the solutions to this was to optimize station positioning so that the beam antennas could be in a line and parallel to one another. The CW station was moved further west from last year's position and the van was moved further east. Another solution was to use "contest quality" transceivers. The GOTA station used a Kenwood TS-930; all other stations used Yaesu FT-1000MP transceivers.

Operation during Field Day proved our predictions. Every station wanted to be on 20 Meters! This band was extremely crowded. The Yaesu FT-1000MP transceiver handled this condition extremely well. Station to station interference was present but was not a major problem. The CW and Digital stations with their narrow band filters in the second and third IF stages rejected most of the interference.

The combination of the hilltop location, antenna, high quality transceivers, and experienced operators allowed each station to "command" a frequency. This is a more efficient mode for contest operation than the "search and pounce" method. If we had a weaker signal, a stronger station could take over the frequency.

The CW station consisting of Steve Long, Jug, and Glen Van Blaricum, W6KNB, made 1277 QSOs.

The Phone Station has apparently "risen to new heights" and made over 1000 contacts. This is a new record for this station.

The Digital Station made approximately 200 contacts. This is a 50% improvement over last year. Mark Snowdon, KG4UDL, was one of the operators and loggers at this station.

The GOTA folks made 248 contacts. This is an excellent score considering band conditions.

SBARC did slightly better in the Bonus Point category this year. We earned 1500 bonus points. We completed every bonus category except for the satellite contact and alternative power contacts. Thanks to Rod Fritz, KB9KMO for ATV demonstration and Jack Goodearl, WA6DQK, for handling NTS message traffic.

Contest operation ended Sunday morning at 11. Sunday afternoon was teardown. Teardown was performed by the same crew that did setup with the addition of Shaw Takeuchi, AE6BL. Hubert Stamps, KC6NAH, returned the van.

Special thanks should also go out to Bruce Gordon, N6OLT. Bruce kept the field day and emergency communications equipment in such great shape that we did not have any equipment problem this year.

Our score this year will be about 10,000 points, plus or minus 100. This is lower than last year by one percent. Due to the propagation conditions, I would expect scores to average ten percent lower than last year. The net result is that we probably improved by nine percent.