FIELD DAY 2004 @ KA2BEO Our eleventh consecutive Field Day since 1994 turned out to be even better than the last one. This year was our third time operating in the Club category, Class A. Jeff, KC2IHZ received a few slow-scan television (SSTV) images from Spain for a non-traditional mode demonstration using his Icom PCR-1000 receiver and the W95SSTV program. With a little help from Arthur and I, John, N2PHX set up his Van Gorden G5RV antenna from last year. We decided to change the direction of the dipole's major lobes this year, facing East and West, and were able to install the antenna in an inverted vee configuration. John brought 30 feet of one-inch diameter PVC tubing (Schedule 40 type) that softened a little too much with the summer heat, and made the antenna installation rather amusing, especially while using twine guys. The peak of the dipole sat at about 23 feet high, with each wire end at about 15 feet high. Like most of our past Field Day events, we used a Kenwood TS-120s transceiver again for HF contacts. The radio performs well during battery operation. It's more forgiving to low supply voltages, and draws less current than most digital radios of today. We tracked a few satellites, and considered using FM on AO-27 and FO-29, and SSB on AO-40 with Jeff's 2.4GHz dish and down-converter, but decided to plan a more complete birding station for the next Field Day instead. As in some previous years, we didn't bother to set up stations for VHF, UHF, packet, or PSK31. However, we made the minimum contacts required for natural-power bonus points using QRP on the 20-meter band. Running 5 watts at the beginning of the event, I was able to work five CW stations using power from John's 12-volt exercise bike generator that we used last year, and three other years since 1998. With more than six laptop PCs available, we had plenty of computing power, and used the latest version of N3FJP's Field Day 2.3 program for logging. This was our third year using the Windows based logging software, and as usual, it worked great. As I worked CW, Jeff ran CwGet 1.40 decoding software to help dig out stations from the crowded bands. I made more CW contacts than the previous two years, which helped to improve our score this year. And even though we quit three hours early, bonus points placed our total in the top six of all years. A new tradition for us since last year, the night crew headed out to a diner for breakfast at about 6:00am EDT. Of course, the pool, grill, and visitors added to a weekend of fun for all too. We'll see you again next year. 73 de Rob, KA2BEO.