Field Day 2020 – What’s in a Name?
As you may know, our normal Field Day at the fire training center is not happening this year. Many members are taking advantage of the rule changes to operate class 1D or 1E from home. One of the changes the ARRL made —for this year only —is the ability to aggregate our individual scores under one club name. Please note that you still just make contacts with your own call but when it comes time to send in your Field Day entry, in the spot for club name you can add a name and everyone that uses that same club name will see a single entry in the results for that club name. Your regular entry listing with your own callsign still appears.
This just gives a way for club members to all contribute to a single score —Field Day is not a real contest so it is not terribly important but in case you do, I wanted to send out some recommended names. The reason is that when all the scores are added up, it goes by the match of the club name. Hence, if I sent in my log with a club name of SPARC, a second member uses St. Petersburg ARC and yet a third uses St. Petersburg Amateur Radio Club, those are three different names and three different club names would appear and the scores would not be added up.
To help alleviate that, I thought I would offer some club names to standardize upon to minimize this issue:
Since we normally operate Field Day as a joint club effort —and in respect of those efforts —I have opted to use the same club name I send when I submit the entry in a normal year: I use the following name (somewhat abbreviated for it will not fit on the QST listing:
Clearwater ARS / St. Petersburg ARC / Upper Pinellas ARC
If you want to use one of the specific club names, try one of these:
- Clearwater Amateur Radio Society
- St. Petersburg Amateur Radio Club
- Upper Pinellas Amateur Radio Club
I am also planning an after Field Day Saturday morning presentation to walk through the process of sending in your Field Day entry. More info on that later but it is tentatively scheduled for 10:00 AM EDT on July 11, 2020.
