Club members gathered in the front lawn of fellow member Eric to set up for the annual Field Day event. Starting around 10m members began arriving. Ralph immediately began setting up his buddipole for operating on the 15m band. Eric began assembling his 40 foot mast to be used to raise an OCF antenna. Once enough members had arrived the m8ast was pulled up and secured. Then the two elements were stretched out and secured in an inverted ‘V’ orientation.

Once the main HF stations were in operation Don set up his 2m VHF radio with a pole mounted vertical ground plane base antenna. This was attached to a mirage amplifier and then to his hand held. So with three operating positions established we were ready for the 11am start.

Band conditions were decent and Ralph was soon making a good number of CW contacts on 15m. Jim was busy with phone on 20m and Eric putting out some calls on 2m. We made a reasonable number of contacts in the frirst hour and a half doing mostly hunting. Meanwhile Jim got the babeque lit and started cooking some Moose burgers that were to be the treat for the day. The burgers were quite good and being moose they provided a fun aspect to our eating together.

Done with lunch we continued operating for another hour or so being done by 2:30pm. By the end of the operating period we had completed around 70 contacts across the three bands. It may not be a huge number but we had a lot of fun and proved the set up was sufficient for making contacts. So from an emergency operating view the set up was very successful. We had a new ham join us for the event and he was able to see how things were done and to try out some operating.