2007 Field Day
Field Day fell on June 23-24, and the Superstition ARC met at the Oak Flat Campground, 1.7 miles east of the tunnel on the road through Superior, some 40 miles east of what the Phoenix news media refers to as "far east" Mesa, and 60 miles east of Tempe. Temperature was very comfortable, with an overnight low of 54 degrees.
My multi-million-dollar deal to obtain rights-of-way for a cool air pipeline to bring some of that nice air into the hot Valley has hit a snag, forcing me to invest in bottled cool air instead.
Field Day Pictures for 2007
Judy, K7JLF, has kindly permitted me to copy the pictures and descriptions from her personal Website, dedicated to pictures of club events at http://k7jlf.home.att.net/, for reproduction on the Club site. Visit the picture pages she has recently reorganized by going to the site front page.
These pictures are copyright © 2007, Judy, K7JLF, used with permission. I borrowed the descriptions from her site as well, and reproduced some of them here, verbatim. Others I worded differently, or added some background information.
These pages have no more than eight pictures to a page, to encourage faster loading over slow Internet connections (like mine). And as with the remainder of this site, the pages are designed to appear very nearly the same in any modern browser.
Each page has a link at the top to the next page. If you have a tabbed browser, you may wish to load the next page in the sequence in a new tab while you view the current page, and thus cut down on waiting time!
2006 Field Day
T.D., N7ISR, has provided these digital photos from the club's 2006 Field Day, which took place up US 60, east of Superior on private land about 5 miles past the tunnel. Elevation of about 4000 feet provided for a warm day, but not quite like the heat in the Mesa area.
I got an update from Mike, KA9E this morning. The club used Terry's call, NK7T, for Field Day. The group operated in a three-transmitter classification, but I did not ask whether we used emergency power or were on commercial power. The club did have forty. twenty, fifteen and six meters on hand. Fifteen was dead for the most part, and there was one contact on six.
Taking part in this year's Field Day were early arrivals Terry, NK7T and Myrna, KN7M, whose trailer was used for overnight quarters and antenna support; Mike, KA9E, TD, N7ISR, Tony, KB7AQJ and Ron, KD7FGY.
Additional operators showed up throughout the day, including Larry, AD7GL, Ford, KG7IW and Ken, KE4ZWZ. Updated Tuesday, July 18, 2006
I will update this report again if I receive further information or pictures.
Update:
Another dozen pictures were made available from Terry, NK7T. I created one close-up to bring the total to 13. See thumbnails 29 through 41. Updated Friday, July 28, 2006
PICTURES
The original pictures that I received from the camera were 1280x960 pixels, and working from these, I created reduced sizes of 640x480 pixels for full-size viewing one by one in your browser, and these 96-pixel high thumbnails, now numbered for correlation with the descriptions provided below.
I first converted the camera pictures to bitmaps, then created the reduced size jpegs for use on the site. These pictures are named fd01, fd02 and so on.
I also took the original pictures and cropped them to show what the people were doing at original zoom level or 2x zoom. These pictures take their parent pictures' names with a letter "a" added, as in fd01a and fd02a.
Click these thumbnails for a full-size image. Return here by using your Back button.Alternately, you may see the listing of full-size pictures by filename.
The thumbnails are now numbered and a description is provided below by the unmbers. T.D. also sent me three more pictures sent to him from someone else. They are fd15 through fd17, numbered 24 through 28 inclusive.
- Photo fd01: Terry & Myrna's RV provided overnight quarters and support for antennas.
- Photo fd01a: Terry, Mike and Ford are laying out a portable multiband wire antenna. Myrna is in the background.
- Photo fd02: Installing antennas.
- Photo fd02a: Installing antennas.
- Photo fd03: Tall antenna on the RV
- Photo fd03a: Ford adjusting antennas.
- Photo fd04: Mike soldering antenna connections, as Terry and Ford look on.
- Photo fd04a: Closer look at Mike soldering.
- Photo fd05: Mike shooting a weight over a tree to raise the antennas as high as possible. The fishing reel purchased at a garage sale for $1.99 by Terry gave us a lot of trouble trying to get the weight over the tree.
- Photo fd05a: Close-up of Mike taking aim
- Photo fd06: Tony, Ford and Ron are setting up the 20m and 6m stations.
- Photo fd06a: Closer view, but we really don't see beyond their backs.
- Photo fd07: Ford and Ron look on as Mike (out-of-view) begins to erect the wire antenna.
- Photo fd08: With the 20m antenna installed Terry, Mike and Ford finish connecting the radio to begin calling CQ Field Day.
- Photo fd09: Another camera shot of the same
- Photo fd10: Tony working 6m said he heard some stations from Kansas shortly after field day began, but the band closed quickly.
- Photo fd11: Mike calling CQ on 40m and Terry is logging stations.
- Photo fd11a: Just a closer view of Mike calling and Terry logging.
- Photo fd12: Tony moved his 6m location because of interference and tried all day to make contacts on 6.
- Photo fd13: Ford on 20m in a nice shady spot
- Photo 13a: Closer look at Ford
- Photo 14: Another view of Ford in the shade
- Photo 14a: CQ 20, CQ Field Day! Ford hard at work
- New pictures, Photo fd15: Hanging a three-band dipole
- Photo fd15a: Closer view. This is what was used on 40 and 20 meters.
- Photo fd16: The center feed point is ready to go up
- Photo fd16a: Looks like a blue balun is used to connect the feed line to the antenna
- Photo fd17: Gathering under the headquarters awning. A good time was had by all.
Photos 29 through 41 (fd18 through fd29): These photos were scanned from laminated prints from NK7T's digital camera. The first 7 pictures come from 6 originals on a sheet that did not scan with the best focus, but the remaining six showed a texture in the paper the pictures were printed on. One does not get best results when the image being scanned is not flush with the glass, in this case with a thin film of plastic separating the printed picture from the glass.
These pictures were cropped to 3840x2880 pixels, bitmap, to get rid of the border and set a 4x3 aspect ratio in the digital image. They were then reduced to a working dimension of 1280x960, from there reduced to 640x480 jpeg and thumbnail size jpeg.
Once the images were saved to disk from the scanner, I used IrfanView for all additional work, discovering some new ways to use that program. The program is totally free, and available for download on the Web.