FIELD DAY 2006June 24 & 25, 2006Field Day 2006 Sponsored by Combined Clubs of Florida Atlantic University ARC K4FAU & Boca Raton Amateur Radio Association Field Day 2006 Photos by Fred [K9VV], Gary [KA3FZO], Tom [KG4IOY], Marty [KI4IQZ] and Sjaak [W4RIS] Field Day 2006 results in XLS format (3.28MB) Field Day 2006 write up: As usual Field Day 2006 planning started well before June. Nelson [NE4LS] once again volunteered to be the Field Day 2006 coordinator. The plan was more or less the same as last year. Setup as 2A with sloper antennas at the FAU Boca Raton Campus. With Field Day 2006 approaching we found out that our normal location on the FAU campus was almost impossible to get to due to construction on campus so we needed to look for an alternate location. The June 6, 2006 Boca Raton Amateur Radio Association meeting brought a surprise solution to our quest for a new Field Day 2006 location. Gary [KA3FZO] [Photo] invited us to show our skills to Florida's Turnpike Enterprise and the DOT. Florida's Turnpike Enterprise recently had decided to include Amateur Radio in to their disaster plan and the management wanted to see what Amateur Radio could do for them. The location Gary [KA3FZO][Photo] invited us to was the Pompano service Plaza one of the Turnpike's EOCs. The other EOC for the Turnpike is located at the Turkey Lake service Plaza near Orlando and Gary [KA3FZO][Photo] was going to ask an Orlando area club to setup at that EOC. Operating Field Day 2006 as 2F the plans was going to be that we would contact the Turkey Lake EOC from time to time to pass traffic to show Amateur Radio will get trough when all else fails. This change of location meant our flexibility was going to be tested and we had to make sure we brought everything to the Field Day 2006 site because it would be difficult to quickly run back home or to T6 to get that missing connector or cable! With the new location also came the use of 2 DOT mobile towers [Photo]. Because these mobile towers are easy to setup the decision was made to use two beams [Photo]. Before we could use the mobile towers the DOT requested that some of our members would get some training before Field Day 2006 in order to operate these towers safely. Before Field Day 2006 was decided to use Greg's call N4EN for Field Day 2006 to make it easier for our CW operators. N4EN is easy for CW but K4FAU, Kilo Four Fat And Ugly (Fred K9VV came up with this alternative spelling during Field Day 2004) seems to do the trick in SSB. So K4FAU was going to be used by our GOTA station. With the help of the Turnpike's PR officer and our own Press Release we got a lot of attention right before Field Day 2006. We even made it to the front page of the ARRL website! We anticipated a lot of media attention at our Pompano Field Day 2006 site but that did not work out as expected. Maybe it was because we were a Boca (Palm Beach) group in Broward or there was more important news, we don't know. We were mentioned in the Palm Beach edition of the Sun Sentinel and our Turkey Lake counterpart was visited by News 13 [Photo] where our signal was heard on live television during one of our emergency test links with Turkey Lake. Saturday June 24 9:00 am we all got together at the Pompano Service plaza.
Thanks to Ron [KG4DWP] [Photo] we were able to borrow the Boynton Beach Fire Rescue Department fire investigation van [Photo] for our CW setup [Photo] and thanks to Boca Raton Fire Rescue Services we were able to borrow CU-5 [Photo] for our HF SSB [Photo], 6M and Satellite [Photo] operating positions. John [N8JUC] was responsible for the GOTA setup [Photo] and with the help of Rudy's [KF4OM] home brew canopy we had a really nice GOTA setup [Photo]. Trough out Field Day 2006 we had many visitors but most of them were Hams visiting us to see how we do Field Day. I left Saturday evening around 9:30 pm and did not return till Sunday
7:00 am in order to enjoy John's [N8JUC] world famous waffles. Trough
out the night the bands stayed open and our rates were very good. We already
passed the number of contacts made during Field
Day 2005 and with several hours still to go so we were on track to
break our own
record in a big way! Breakdown and cleanup on Sunday went smooth and everybody went home tired but satisfied. Let's get ready for Field Day 2007! Field Day 2006 as experienced by Sjaak [W4RIS][Photo] QSL totals per operator not including GOTA and 6M and before cleaning the log:
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