As part of our on-going emergency preparedness, the club engaged in a mini-field day event today – March 31, 2012. We like to get out and setup in the outdoors and try various configurations of our member’s equipment. Today we were using the baseball field in Centennial Park - the dug-out proved a welcome spot to work out of due to the rain.

Today we helped Jim work a few wrinkles out of his new camper based set-up. He has a nice mast bracket attached to his camper which makes it very quick for him to raise a G5RV antenna. His plans include having a short deployment time when on the road and in the back-country. Today he had some power issues which we traced to a corroded fuse and some SWR problems on the higher bands. It was great fun working inside his camper and by the end of our short time – the rain started getting a bit too heavy – he had made a number of contacts including one in Moldova!

Also on our agenda for the day was to get Dave’s equipment on the air. This was his first HF set-up and he needed some help getting his G5RV antenna figured out and in the air. His new radio – acquired from Deme - needed some Anderson Power poles attached so it could work with Ralph’s battery. Once the power was flowing he was on the air making a number of California contacts on 20m.

Towards noon just as we were packing up and the rain coming down hard, Fire Chief Phil Lemire dropped by to see how we were doing. Unfortunately he didn’t see us operating as we had mostly packed away the equipment. He was able to see part of Jim’s new set-up and chat with us for a while. Once cleared up, 6 of us set out for a warm White Spot lunch to further discuss our time on the air and generally get warmed up. Here are a few photos of the day.