
Antennas
Therefore, the antenna crew got an early start on Saturday June 22, raising the beam on the tall fire tower. The location was our now familiar Field Day site, the Clearwater Fire Training Center. The participants were members of the Clearwater ARS, the St. Petersburg ARC and the Upper Pinellas ARC.
Radios
For the radios, we used two Elecraft K3 transceivers and a Kenwood TS590SG. One K3 was dedicated to CW and the other two radios were used on SSB and FT8. Computer logging was done with TR4W networked together sending data to the Raspberry Pi Display on the big screen.

Alan W4UB with Cathie Perkins, the Pinellas County Emergency Manager [N2ESPhoto]
Bonus Points
Part of Field Day is bonus points. We picked up quite a few of those. We had all emergency power, a sign-in table, Add lots of pictures.
Tom NY4I made use of his Icom 9700 and satellite beam to work W4MLB in south Florida on the CAS-4B satellite. Gerry WR6N was turning the antenna on that pass. This was the fifth attempt with Tom and Paul KA4IOX making attempts all throughout the early morning hours.

So how did we do?
The group made a similar number of contacts as last year. This year there were 1,077 QSOs with a just bit more than half in SSB contacts (611). Last year, we did 1171 QSOs. That difference is just about the number of 6m contacts last year due to better band conditions. So all in all, we made about the same number of QSOs. Bonus points were about the same too as we achieved our major goals of the W1AW bulletin, satellite contact and solar power contacts. This year we did NOT have an elected official but we did add an educational session thanks to Pat AA0O.
We had 28 hams making contacts this year as compared to 24 last year so participation continues to grow. We contest scoring stats can be found in our SH5 score analyzer here.
Our many thanks…
Events like this do NOT just happen. Field Day requires an immense amount of planning and thought. The Field Day planning committee met no fewer than 8 times on a conference bridge along with many other sessions such as the dry-run, coax cable installation and one-on-one phone calls. Alan W4UB, club president of UPARC, led the team this year with assistance from the following:
- CARS: Jeff NE4C, Dave KG4CNG, Ron W4RFA
- SPARC: Rich AA2MF, Pat AA0O, Lisa KC1YL and Tom NY4I
- UPARC: Alan W4UB, Jason N4BOZ, Gerry WR6N, Glenn N4ESU, Ken WK4KM
While the members are listed from their respective clubs (although many of us belong to two or all three), it is important to know this is a joint effort and the greater group becomes paramount versus the individual clubs. Again, thanks to everyone that made this a success.