VHF NFD 2023
VHF National Field Day, Sat 1st Sun 2nd July 2023
This is the third year RADARS has entered the VHF National Field Day contest. The last two years we have had rain, lots of rain, this year we had wind, not ideal when you have large Yagi antennas 33 feet in the air.
New equipment added this year; two rotators, 50MHz 6ele Yagi and a 144MHz 13ele Yagi. Our ultimate aim is for RADARS to own all the necessary equipment to enter VHF contests, of which there are more than you can shake a stick at.
It was decided to run two stations in the low power section, 144MHz operating Saturday and Sunday, 50MHz on Saturday swopping to 70MHz on the Sunday. Setting up was a lot easier than previous years, mostly due to lots of help from RADARS members and we almost started on time, unfortunately we are still short of operators.
The contest started 3pm local and the new 144MHz Yagi began pulling in stations from Europe, then disaster struck, the Yaesu ft-dx10 which was being used with a transverter and has worked flawlessly for the last eleven months, started intermittently not to transmit, apparently a known issue for which there is a firmware update. Next, we were hit by very high levels of qrm, (qrm = I have interference) making operating almost impossible at times, both on 144MHz and 70MHz.
Still an enjoyable weekend, we again learnt a lot and hopefully we’ll be back more organised, better equipped with more operators for next year’s VHF NFD.
A big thank you to all who helped. Results to follow.
Stephen Limbert M0KOV
This is what we did; https://www.rsgbcc.org/vhf/rules/2023/VHFNFD.shtml
