Ham Radio Field Day occurs the last full weekend in June every year. This is one of the hobby’s best liked events and ham radio clubs and operators take their equipment to the field, set up in a temporary location, and attempt to get as many contacts with other ham radio operators around the world as possible.

Last year in June the Honolulu ham radio club held their field day activities over on the western side of the island and I wasn’t able to get over there. This year the event was held at a regional park on the ocean a few miles south of Laie. Even better, I had a few hours in the morning this morning available, so I drove down and “played radio” for a couple of hours.

The club had set up two ham radio stations. One was operating CW (that is, morse code) and the other operating single sideband (that is, voice). Several antennas were set up along the seashore pointing generally northeast to southwest (towards North America on the northeast and towards southern Asia to the southwest). The CW (that stands for ‘continuous wave’, meaning it is just sending a tone. Single sideband, or voice, sends a modulated signal so that the voice can be extracted from it by the receiving station) station was connected to an amplifier running several hundred watts of transmitted power. The voice station’s amplifier was broken, so it was running “barefoot” … putting out one hundred watts of power. There was a LOT of static and band conditions were generally pretty poor, but I was able to make several contacts in the few minutes I was able to sit at the transmitter behind the microphone. Being setup on the seashore beside a huge body of salt water is a major benefit to radio transmitters. Even with a small amount of power, the location helps the antennas to be much more efficient.

I then assisted putting up the last of the antennas, a trapped dipole set to work in an inverted V configuration tuned for the 75/80 meter band. Thats a lot of words describing a wire hung on a pole about 40′ in the air with either end stretching down to the ground at about a 45° angle. The radio that would be using this antenna hadn’t arrived, yet.

While I was there, the other missionary ham radio operator here in Laie, Paul Crookston KB7ZIH and his wife stopped by the field day location. He had been the radio operator on the Iosepa double-hulled canoe that I’ve written about previously, the one that I reported as having capsized. Paul clarified that it wasn’t the Iosepa that capsized, it was the pilot boat! It wasn’t anchored properly, was very tail heavy, and just before midnight last Saturday night, it flipped over. The Iosepa weathered the seas just fine … the modern-technology boat didn’t. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere….

Ta ta for now!