ARRL Field Day 2023 was June 24th and 25th and ran 24 hours from 1pm Saturday to 1pm Sunday. We were at Bickham Rudkin Park which is on 33rd Street east of Boulevard. We were class 3A on generator and battery power for the duration.

Field Day Post-Event Recap

First of all I would like to thank each of you for helping make Field Day 2023 a success! It takes a number of people to put on an event like this and many of you were there to help set up, operate, tear down and spend time together. I appreciate every one of you.

As you know, we were in a new location this year. The tradeoff of being outside in this park instead of the air conditioning at the fire station is that we were very visible to the public. I know of at least a couple of people who wandered in to see what we were doing. There were some misconceptions I was able to clear up and give a few people a better understanding of what we do. By the way, we weren’t just preparing for a zombie apocalypse…

We even had a visitor all the way from Alabama. He was in Stillwater for a friend’s wedding and he heard traffic on our repeater Saturday morning. He looked us up, found our field day site and drove down for a couple of hours.

Looking at the sign-in sheet, we had about 50 people come out at some point. I am pretty sure not everyone signed in so we had more than 50. We even had our Oklahoma Section Manager Mark Kleine, N5HZR, visit Saturday night.

I have exported log data from Field Day so here is a brief summary. This is very preliminary and does not reflect all of the bonus points and extra multipliers that are available. Plus I am pretty sure there at least a couple of duplicates due to the way FT8 logs contacts.

CW – 162
Digital (FT8 and FT4) – 501
Phone – 563
Total – 1,226

I would like to thank Ethan, KI5VME, for staying all night and working digital with me. He kept right on trucking even when I kept dozing off while making FT8 contacts on 80m.

We also gathered for dinner Saturday evening. Thank you to everyone who was able to join us. Our next club dinner will be in August.

We will find a time in a couple of weeks to meet and have a post-event discussion. We are very interested in hearing feedback. You are welcome to share your comments at any time by sending them to fieldday@k5eok.org. I am also available for phone calls if you would prefer.
 

Fox 25 News Story

Saturday morning Fox 25 was on site. A journalist was on site for probably 40-45 minutes capturing video of our Field Day set up. We were still setting up but he did a great job capturing the essence of what we were doing and why. Please take a look when you have a minute. It can be difficult to get media coverage like this so I am very thankful for them making the effort to share our story.

https://okcfox.com/news/local/oklahoma-ham-radio-operators-amateur-communication-drill-world-household-electricity-focus-battery-solar-generator-power-nation-country-field-day#


Thank you again to each one of you. This is your club and all of you should be proud of what we are accomplishing together!

73,

Steven Christy – N5ZQ
EARS Vice President/HF Coordinator/Field Day Coordinator
fieldday@k5eok.org