It was back to the USS Yorktown with the Charleston ARS club this year, operating overnight once again. Brian, KN4EXJ, was Field Day Captain, and I did a lot of mentoring.
I showed up Saturday around 11am with the laptops for logging. We completed the setup for two emergency stations, and got on the air at 2pm. Surprisingly there were no squall lines coming through at the start, though we could see some activity off-shore.
On Saturday we had plenty of operators, so I just kept an eye on things. The CW operators took a break so I got on for a few minutes and made 32 FT8 contacts. Further digital activity was stopped when the magic smoke escaped from the bandpass filter and threatened to do the same to the antenna autotuner.
Sunday morning is my favorite time; the overnight operators are burned out and 15m starts to open. After working a few stations I set up and ran for 85 or so contacts in about 90 minutes until the day crew arrived.
The rest of my operating time was spent logging for the CW operators, giving me my annual immersion in fairly-fast code.
At 2pm Sunday we shut down and took down the site. Now to help Brian with the score reporting…
