Field Day is ham radio’s open house. Every June, more than 40,000 hams throughout North America set up temporary transmitting stations in public places to demonstrate ham radio’s science, skill and service to our communities and our nation. It combines public service, emergency preparedness, community outreach, and technical skills all in a single event. Field Day has been an annual event since 1933, and remains the most popular event in ham radio.
Please consider signing up at https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0B45A9A62BA2FCC16-49856375-w9mid and joining MARC for a fun day! Please do use the sign-in link so we can plan for the right number of people. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Kyle Burns, Field Day Coordinator and find the answer. Kyle’s contact info is on the MARC Roster in the Members Only section or on the public Contacts and Coordinators page on this websites.
Information From Kyle:
Goal
Our goal is to spend time with radio people doing radio stuff! Field Day gives us a fun way to track how many contacts we make and put some structure around it, but our Field Day event is not about “winning”.
“Prizes”
To help make the event a little more fun, I will be making some small mementos for the event. At July’s club meeting, I plan to have something for each person that shows up as an operator in our log and something additional for the person who has the farthest contact in each mode recognized by Field Day (PHONE, CW, DIG). It will be entirely possible to be the person who gets the “prize” by making a single contact on a single mode that weekend.
Location
We will be holding the event at the Brown County State Park Rally 1 campground which has a capacity of 150 people and offers a large, flat open area to set up antennas. There is a restroom nearby as well as a spigot for potable water and a convenience store, but no shelter or utilities are part of the site itself. Shade will likely be in short supply, so it’s reasonable to assume that we can’t have too many canopies that day.
If you do not already have a park pass, please remember that Brown County State Park has an entrance fee of $2 per person (DNR: State Parks: Entrance Fees (in.gov)). Park passes are a great value if you want to get out into Indiana’s state parks and currently run $50 per year (allows vehicle and everyone in it) with a “Golden Hoosier” discount that makes it $25 per year for Indiana residents age 65 or older.
Schedule
I will be checking into the site on the afternoon of Friday, June 21 and we are planning to lay out the site and put up antennas that evening from 6p-9p. It will be a great opportunity to share knowledge about different layout and mounting options and all are welcome to participate.
We are currently planning to operate mostly on Saturday, June 22. The official start time is 2pm local time and we’re going to have a pitch-in before the event. Even if you don’t plan on operating with us, you’re encouraged to sign up and come to the pitch-in as it will be a great time to spend some time outdoors with each other.
We are currently NOT planning to operate on Sunday, June 23 based on our experience at Winter Field Day with people only wanting to operate on Saturday. We do have the site until 2pm on Sunday and I am willing to stay over, so if there’s enough interest we can extend into Sunday.
What do I need to bring?
Yourself, something to sit on, and some water is considered the minimum! I’m also very much encouraging everyone to participate in the pitch-in and bring something to share.
Aside from that, as mentioned above it would be very helpful if people bring pop-up canopies so that we can create a more comfortable area to operate in. Since we won’t have commercial power mains available, we could use some people bringing portable batteries with them if you have them just to give us more confidence that we won’t run out of juice. We should have enough, but more than enough is certainly not going to hurt!
We are going to operate as a 4A entry for Field Day, which means that we will be able to have a maximum of four simultaneous transmitters. There will be sufficient equipment to support this onsite, but Field Day is also a great opportunity to get exposure to a variety of other equipment so people are welcome and encouraged to bring their own transceivers and antennas as well – we’ll just have to coordinate to ensure that we remain at or below 4 transmitters operating simultaneously to be within the rules of the event.
