I’ll get to that in a bit.
If you’ve been reading my blog lately, or at least most of the recent blog entries anyway, it might come to your attention that I’ve been talking about a few things all related to my being involved in the Science Fiction convention CONvergence. I suppose you might even be thinking to yourself ‘doesn’t he do anything that isn’t related to that stupid convention?’
While it’s not Completely unrelated, I do tie things together through a variety of connections you may also note, this blog entry really isn’t about CONvergence. In fact that should be the last mention here.
Hi! My name is kc0vcu, and I’m a ham. 
Well, ok, it’s not really my name, but it is my call sign. It is ‘randomly assigned’ as it were, though I could get a vanity sign that might be more ‘custom’ to my interests. “I said we won’t go there, so don’t go off on that tangent on your own either.) There are limits to what a call sign may look like. At the moment in the US, a call sign begins with one or two letters, begining A, K, or W, a number from 0 through 9, followed by 1 to 3 letters. In ‘randomly’ assigned call signs, the number reflects the region that your request came from when you initially received your call sign. Minnesota is in ’section 10′ thus a 0 in the digit’s location.
There are reasons to select certain characters and character conbinations in a call sign. You might ask for k5e if you are a CW fanatic, as it would be very short. Or if you are really fanatic about being a ‘ham’ you might ask for somehting like aa1ham. If you are Mike, and are married to a Juliet, and you spend a lot of time on single sideband where you may be using a lot of phonetics, you might ask for WJ2M and use ‘wedded’ in place of ‘whisky’. (people do all sorts of phonetic substitutions, I’ve been known to say that vcu stands for very cold user rather than victor charly uniform which is the correct phonetic for vcu.
What havign a call sign means though is that (in the us) the federal govornment recognizes me as a geek. Well, more specifically a radio geek, but along with that comes other geeky experiences. No, I was not on the ‘AV team’ in high school, though I was in Band and held a perfect record on the Chess team. (I lost every game I ever played.) But there wa sno doubt from fairly early on that I would be playing with technology in lots of different, and (to me) interesting ways. I’ve played with CB’s, the various UHF and VHF licence free, and fixed rate licence radio systems, computers, home theater stuff, and so on for most of my life. But there is not a lot of stuff out there that compares with Amateur radio when it comes to trying different things.
If you want, you can do nothing more than chat with friends on handheld radios without ever using a repeater. Or you can set up a station in your house to talk with people in over a hundred countries using voice, code, rtty, psk, or lots of other technologies. You can chat from your computer, without ever owning or touching a ham radio, and the only people you talk to are using ham radio equipment. You can send pictures, TV, support emergency data and voice communications, and bounce signals off the moon if you want.
A whole lot of this gets done every day, and just about every weekend on the calendar, there’s one ‘contest’ or another going on. Contests are usually quick 6 hour to 2 day events where you compete with other operators to see who can earn the most ‘points’ in that period. Depending on the contest there are different ‘multipliers’ ranging from prefix combinations (the one or two letters in front of the number in a call sign, as well as the number) through states, zones, ‘grids,’ countries, and even ‘modes.’ (A CW contact is almost always worth twice a voice contact.)
Because of the variety of things that Hams do with radios, it is often confusing to people as to what exactly do hams do. Partly to address this, partly to have another contest, and partly to show that hams can do all of this from locations other than ‘home’ or the ‘club station,’ various organizations hold ham ‘Field Days.’ The ARRL, or American Radio Relay League, holds one on the last full weekend in June. Different clubs and people handle Field Day differently. Some set up a tent on the local high spot, and send up antenna’s using baloons, antenna towers, slingshots into trees, etc. Some go to places where they can eliminate nearly all of the near by city noises. Some set up air conditioned trailers or RV’s. Some work with local communities to demonstrate that they can support them in a time of crisis.
The club I currently consider myself to belong to, has an agreement with one of the local cities parks and recreation departments to setup in, and work from a park building that the city uses at other times during the year, but which they have been so pleased with the visibility it gives them that they practically beg us every year to come back and set up there again.
The basic process is that at about 8:00 am on Saturday the Hams show up at the field day site. They are not allowed to pre-position or start set up of any equipment prior to that. Over the next 5 hours they get to set up everything they are going to use over the weekend. (Minor exception being any special picnic materials brought in on Sunday.) at 1:00 pm on Saturday a 24 hour contest happens on 160, 80, 40, 20, 15, 10 and 6 meters. You can even make contacts via satellite in 2 meter and 70cm bands. As an operator you want to contact as many people in each of those bands as you can, without re-contacting anyone in the same band on the same mode twice. So if aa1ham contacts me on 20 meters voice, I can contact him on 20 meters CW, but not on voice again on 20 meters. Or I can try to contact him on 40 meters, and so on.
The various bands operate with better and worse results depending on a number of factors, including local noise from the area around you, either environmental or man made, through the number of sun-spots on the face of the sun. (It’s actually a lot more important than most non-hams think.) At the moment, time of day has more effect on radio reception than anything else, but that changes from year to year as well.
In any case, I get off work at about 8:00 am on Saturday morning, so after making a quick stop at my apartment to pick up some hardware, and take care of my dogs, I headed out to the field day site, and helped with setup. We ran into a few problems, mostly contest related, but we also had come hardware problems that are being worked on as well. And a few problems with getting things set up antenna wise.
Some of the problems plagued us the entire event, others got solved early on. Because of one problem, we ran into issues with using specific hardware on specific bands. I tend to suspect this problem will get solved, as it is not something that I think we want to experience again. Amoung other things it prevented us from using perfectly capable hardware at times when it would have been the best tool for the job.
For me though, setting up was about the extend to what I was prepared to do for the day. I had come off a 12 hour shift, and about 5 hours of setup pretty much took the rest of me out of the picture for the day. I went home, and got some sleep. I went back out to the site to start a contest shift from 7 to 9 am. I wouldn’t say that my contribution was particularly fantastic, but I did make contacts, and had a good time as well. There are people who practically live for the contest, and won’t be satisfied unless the team or they themselves are at the top of the rankings. I have to admit that I’m not one of those people. Probably why I never won a game of chess in the chess club I suppose. That said, I hope that what I contributed was something that was not provided equally well elsewhere. I don’t know though.
All in all, I had a good time. after my shift, I made a run back to the appartment to take care of my pups, then back out to the field day site to help with tear-down. I missed the picnic food, but I’m OK with that.
Oh, the title? Besides being the name of the weekend event, where along with the contest we attempt to show local public safety and others what we are capable of, Field Days was the name of a sales event at Marshall Fields. And yes, at least where I live, the Marshall Fields stores in my area were all bought by, and became Macy’s department stores.
It’s a crazy world some times.
