Try 75 Meters SSB late at night when everybody's tired and/or the beer is kicking in. It can get hilariously wild and wooly.

Scattered thunderstorms have been rolling through all afternoon. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Our club was working 2D this weekend. I had some work to catch up on at the house and was going to head over this evening and work til midnight or after. Only had two operators and they had shut down at 7:30 so I am going to operate 1D at home for a while. KD5IFA

Well I really messed up this year. Seems to me that FD was always the last full weekend in June.

Apparently it is the fourth weekend this year so I was at work.

Still, I think I have someone at work interested in ham radio so I'm going to take the portable

shortwave radio to work tomorrow and see if I can "set the hook" on him.

Hope the rest of you are having a good time and making some contacts or at least working the bugs

out of your portable systems.

73 es gud dx de KB7DX.

Tornado warning here then torrential rain so haven't been able to do much.

In central Iowa we shut down about an hour ago due to lighting. Now the thunderstorms have moved in and it's pouring out! Otherwise lots of contacts were being made.

Guess I'll buck the bad weather trend.  After a full week of constant rain in NE Ohio, we had a beautiful sunny and 75 degree day today.  Setup at a campsite in western PA and operated 1B, made a good number of contacts all afternoon and evening. Plan to get back to it in the morning before packing in.

@Mancow - Similar issue this morning for me. I'm in SE Kansas and the weather is not cooperating (heavy t-storms).

Not a lot of signals yet, on 20m, but the one's that are there, are pretty strong.  I think I'm pretty far behind where I was last year, so hopefully I'll be able to pick up a few more QSO's today.

I paid a visit yesterday to one of my clubs, Nashua Area Radio Society, https://www.n1fd.org/ They are running 11A with 4 towers and tons of gear. Sadly there was a brief but noisy clap of thunder and huge black clouds appearing ~2:15PM, so they shut down until the threat was over. We left at that point. We did have a nice tour by the club president of all the tents and equipment prior to the contesting.

I worked them on 20 cw.

15 is open if anybody's interested.

Litterally just worked them on 14.304

Its a bit up and down but ive made a few on 10M as well.

Well I had fun, but overall, my numbers were much lower than last year, or the year before.  I'm still amazed by the K2.  I probably had it on for at least 10 hours, and it didn't even put a dent in my battery.  Fun little radio.

I am just listening.
Is it that all my receivers have gone deaf? Or maybe band conditions overall are down, but there seems a lot less activity.
There was a time, not so long ago, when it was wall to wall signals. Hard to find a slot to put out a call without treading on someone.

Even FT8 doesn't seem that much busier than normal - except that 99.9% are "CQ FD" calls.

Using my new KX3 mostly (with side trips back to the IC-7600 just to prove to myself that things are really that quiet).
Yes, the KX2/3 really are excellent QRP rigs!

I was on for awhile this morning and 40 and 20 were wall-to-wall. Once 15 opened up there was a fair amount of activity but I think most wre having such a good time on 20 that they didn't bother trying 15.

I worked 41 stations on 40, 40 on 20, and 13 on 15 in a period of about 3 hours, running 50 Watts CW into my trap/fan dipole. The panoramic adapter really paid off, I could see the strong stations and pick them off like chiggers in a patch of Queen Anne's Lace (AKA "chigger-bush" in these parts).

We worked about 650 stations on a mix of phone and CW as a 2A. Didn't even try digital this year.

We have a full size 80m dipole and an OCF for 40 that worked fantastic on 40 and 20. Even got around 50 contacts on 15 this year. Heard a few stations on 10 but didn't work any.

Ironically this was the year that we decided as a club to not take it too seriously, and we set a record for the club

Our K4YTZ club was running 4A. I helped to operate the CW station from about 8-ish PM through midnight. 80 meters CW was lousy. 20 meters was in good shape all the way through midnight. 40 meters was very busy but noisy.

Took my little Grundig G3 to work today and downloaded PSKDroid on my

phone and showed the prospective ham at work. Walked out onto the ramp to

get away from the  electrical noise near the building.

Picked up several signals and the hook may be set.

on another note, the Woodbury fire to the northeast is raging and approaching 100,000 acres.

The wind shifted last night and pushed the smoke our direction this morning.

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Eerie looking the way the smoke filters the sunlight.

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Wind shifted in the afternoon and blew the smoke to the east.

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20m was crazy. We worked all of New England, almost every Canadian province, Oregon, California, Colorado, Arizona, and the Carolinas on 20 - pretty much back to back. In order, I worked Rhode Island, LAX, STX, Arizona, and CT and 3/5 told me I was booming in. IIRC there were 3 stations calling CQ on phone that couldn't hear me, and only 1 on CW.

We got lucky and hit that magic antenna elevation and orientation that just cut through pileups for some reason.

Two years ago we bought bandpass filters for 20, 40, and 80m. They're magic for staying out of the other radios. Insertion loss is quite low - we probably lose more in the coax than the filters - and you don't have to worry about losing that weak CW station when someone starts transmitting phone on another band. Except when someone tries to switch bands and forgets about the filters and can't find a tuning solution or any other stations on the band

Our own mini-Field Day.  Not in the picture is @TNC IC-7200 (sitting in a custom backpack rig on the ground, back left area in picture.)

We mostly messed around with different antennae setups (though I didn't take any pictures of that) for 20m and 40m.

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20m was the primary band for me.  40m was noisy here too, so I didn't stay on it very long. 15m was quiet, but I only heard a few stations there.  I never heard a single station from the "1" call sign area.  Not one, and that was with a good 10 hours sitting at the radio. There were quite a few stations who could not hear me, but that's not too surprising, since I was only running 5w, into an attic antenna.

I set up the 40/80 station at W7MRF, 2A AZ. Up in the high elevation tall-pine mountains above Payson AZ, 3 to 4 hour drive from home. temperatures were great, 70's in the day, 40's at night, wind was the same, in mph it seemed, bringing the wind chill factor to about -40F or was it -40C, it felt like -40K at times....

another guy set up 20/15/10. between us we managed to make 422 contacts, spread out between CW and SSB on all 5 bands (10 band/mode slots).

I'm mostly a CW guy.... and trying to work 40 SSB or worse, 80, reminded me why...

we were 2A because we had 2 operators, 2 transmitters and 2 dogs.

Poole

.-  .-  ....-  --.-

After working CW for several hours and switching to phone once I hit the upper limit of the CW band I realized that I have no patience for phone anymore

CW rounds take 10 seconds or less for an over, and I heard people on phone take about an hour to give their class and section.

We had a lot of weather issues on Saturday.  As 1pm rolled around, we had to disconnect because we had lightning in the area.

After about 30 minutes, it was good to go.  We got a lot of 40M phone and digital contacts.  But by the late afternoon, because of all the thunderstorms to the north of us, there was A LOT of static on 80, 40 and 20.  Too much to really make many contacts.

We had to disconnect around 6:30pm again because of the lightning in the area.  Since the storm was going to be with us for a while, we decided to call it a night and pick it back up in the morning.

But, even with all the problems, it was good to get out, practice our setup, operate and fellowship with fellow hams!

Two of us were at 6000' about 40 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

My buddy brought a 100W solar panel that we connected to my Flint Hills Radio solar charge controller (http://ki0bk.no-ip.com/~pwrgate/LLPG/Site/Solar.html ) charging a 105 AH AGM battery. I think the battery may have lasted without charging, but it was nice to know it was always topped off.  I also had two 6V deep cycle batteries connected in parallel (120 AH) - just in case, but we never used them.  Too heavy.  Never. Again.

Our two primary radios were my FT991 w/ Heil Pro 7 headset and my buddy's FT817ND. He was making CW & SSB contacts at 5 watts (and a few with 2.5 watts on its internal battery). I was working nearly everyone I could hear with 100 watts on the FT991. Operating casually, we ended up with 142 QSOs. 20 and 40 meters were open and packed the whole time. 15 meters was strong and very busy mid-day on Saturday and 10 meters was busy enough that it was worth checking when I was tired of the QRM on 20 / 40. 6 meters was open for a bit Saturday morning, and a shorter period Sunday before we tore everything down.

I left the FTM400 in the truck most of the time (beaconing APRS) and listening for 146.52 traffic on an external speaker. On 146.52 and a vertically polarized yagi, we had no difficulty talking into Vegas, Pahrump, Armagosa Valley and one chap who was at work somewhere north of us.

We had my Cushcraft R8 on a 10' antenna hitch mast for 6 - 40 meters and my home made mag loop for 40 & 20 meters (QRP) for the FT817ND. A 4 el horizontal yagi and a 170 watt amp netted a few SSB contacts on 144.200, but just Vegas and Pahrump. I thought we'd do better with it (i.e. Utah / Phoenix, since we were at 6000').

I set up a 124.5 end fed with a 9:1 unun (for 80 / 160), but forgot my good auto tuner at home. I couldn't get the match good enough for the FT991's internal tuner, so instead of staying up all night on 80 / 160, we got some sleep. I brought a 4el LFA for 6 meters, but just used the Cushcraft vertical since it has an omnidirectional pattern.

A few important lessons learned:
* Don't forget important stuff at home thinking you'll remember to unhook it from the home antenna system at 5:00 AM (outdoor base mounted tuner)...
* Don't bring too much stuff... simple was effective. Too many pieces loaded / unloaded and not used.
* QRP and 5 watts can work wonders, even with simple antennas.
* Field Day is more fun when it's 75 degrees / 50 degrees than it is when it's a billion and two down in the Vegas valley.

Ever tried SOTA?
5 watts & simple antennasget out like crazy.

I haven't, but my buddy probably will with his (new to him) FT817ND.  He loves the low power stuff!

Me?  Dragging my a$$ up a worthy hill would leave me unfit to play radio.

Glad to hear you guys had fun. AZ wasn't too bad, 80ish during the day and high 40's at night. I'd call with BACON!!!! and they always responded with bravo.  Did field day on my tarheel in the back of my truck. Worked VERY well. First 10 of 12 calls logged first call.

Oh yeah, Pro Tip: do not drive 200 miles out to the middle of now where to do field day without remembering to bring your microphone. Thankfully a member of the group brought his entire shack and 4 or 5 boxes of parts and pieces from storage. I had a large selection of mic's to choose from. His table looked like a Ham Swap Meet was going on. Everyone kept making low ball bids on his gear and he got a little pissed.  

Had fun, that's the most important part.

I manually set the win10 time by listening to FT8 signals with the manual time set to 00 secs. I get the timing down from end of FT8 signals to beginning and just hit the button with the mouse at what I think the start is and have gotten it to 0.2 secs sync pretty easy.

Our field day turned from field day to sit inside and drink beer during torrential rains while tornado sirens wailed.