Field Day 2014 - Wed, Jul 9, 2014

I’ve always wanted to do Field Day where we go deer hunting.  It has the makes of everything a radio nerd would love.  Wide open spaces, high altitude (5k feet), about an hour from the nearest town, and nestled in a valley where nobody knows you’re there.  Every year in October when I haul my radio gear up there I think “Man, It would be awesome to do Field Day up here!”.

This year it happened.  Greg, a newly licensed ham, took the leap of faith and accompanied me on the 6 hour drive into Nevada and up the Eastern California boarder to about an hour East of Susanville into the vast reaches of BLM nothingness.

We make it up there, we setup.  Through the tangle of wires, the throwing of lines into trees to string antennas, wondering if the generator is going to last the entire time, random water in the basement, old guys on 80m who can’t hear, big spiders, and a random case of a recorded ‘derp a derp derp derp’ that mysteriously appeared on my radio voice recorder; we managed to bag 125 contacts.  Here is the map of the stations we contacted.

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