Post Field Day questions

Yesterday I went to my first ever Field Day (afternoon) after being licensed. I got to talk to several people and got to sit and listen to Hams trying to make contact. It seemed like the club was having a hard time making contacts, but I guess that is relative. I have a couple of questions now and I hope this is the right place to ask.

1) It was mentioned that there had recently been some solar event and that this might be the cause of the difficulty making contacts. What event might this have been?

2) Most people were operating on the HF bands, in particular the 10, 20, 40 and 80 meter bands. I noticed that all the antennas where "just" straight vertical antennas. Is there a reason for this choice?

3) Also, I understand that HF is good for making contacts further away and that VHF and UHF don't bounce of the atmosphere as well. But can HF also be received line of sight? That is, can I sit locally and monitor my local HF transmitters with a HF radio?

1) See http://www.swpc.noaa.gov and http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/content/education-and-outreach

2) Maybe they just like verticals. Others seem to prefer dipoles for portable use.

3) Yes.

Regarding #3, the 80 meter band will often work for short distances. I've talked to guys 10 miles away on 80m. I've also talked from central Indiana to Hawaii on 80m. It all depends on the antennas being used and the propagation (which varies from day to day and hour to hour).

Many state phone nets are on 75m, which works quite well. For example, in my state, the Arkansas Razorback Net operates on 3.9875 LSB every evening at 6:30PM (regardless of daylight savings or no daylight savings) and I manage to hear most stations quite well. When I check in, I am usually heard by the net control operator with my piddly 100 watts into a dipole antenna... although sometimes if the background noise level is high I can't get through.

I would say conditions were not optimal. CW seemed to be fairly active as our club logged almost all states. And New Zealand was heard. As with HF, timing means a lot. We used both verticals and beams.

I just listened, but the bands sounded okay to me. 80/75 was pretty noisy with lightning crashes but the rest of HF sounded good. 10 meters had activity on SSB and CW, and 6 was open here in Wisconsin to Texas and Oklahoma.

Antenna choices are individual. I've been in groups with towers and beams, other times we just strung up wires. It's all good. :^]

We were suffering the aftermath of another CME coronal mass ejection from the sun which can disrupt communication all over the planet and may even knock out the power grid if it is strong enough.

I had too many other things going on, and missed out on FD. I am hearing that conditions were not the best, and even 40m was not very useful.

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Had a blast on 15 meters USB on FD Sunday. Dozens of contacts. Long live 15 meters!

We had good conditions. Started off on 15, went down to 80 through the night, then back up to 15. (stayed off 40 cuz that's where our CW station was). Worked quite a few IN's Sunday morning on 15, bill4long. Maybe you were one. Tried 10 for about a half hour, could hear quite a few but they couldn't hear us, so went back to 15 until the end.

Good conditions here for the FD event at W5OK, every band worked at various times, even 10mtrs on Saturday afternoon. I mostly worked the 40mtr station which was on a dipole and had stations stacked on top of one another, tough to separate. Another, more experienced, operator came on and started just running CQ and gathered a big pile-up around suppertime Saturday. As the evening came on, that became the 75mtr station and was equally busy. We had 20mtr on a vertical, plenty of traffic received, created a couple of pile-ups when running a frequency, and got two stations in Hawaii just before 6am local on Sunday morning.

Overall, the two-club cooperative effort got over 500 contacts between digital and phone while only missing a few sections on the log. Some left thinking we could easily double that with similar conditions next year. Of course, a lot of the conversation was about the great BBQ brisket that was enjoyed Saturday evening.