Another year, another field day goes into the log books. A rare whole field shot that actually shows the whole scope of the field, thanks to the nifty new wide angle lens acquired by Saul, K1BI for his new Nikon D80. Could never fit it in using my old 28mm on the new camera and then I found out you needed an 18mm to produce the results of a 28mm with the new half-frame digital SLR's. I knew the scene use to fit on my old 35mm Nikon F501 with the 28mm lens on it. Oh well, progress doesn't always go in a forward direction - hi.

If anything, this year's FD was a lot of new surprise stuff no one was expecting. Like, who has the fifth tower kit bag? We actually had to revert to erecting a Rohn tower like the old days or forego the use of the a beam at the Phone station. It's a good thing we had a few people show up for setup that knew how to put together a Rohn tower and at least one spry individual who could actually climb the tower. So, the question remains, where could that huge canvas kit bag full of parts for the fifth tower, possibly have gone? It's not exactly the kind of thing one waltzes around with dangling from one hand, it weighs a ton. The new Phone and CW trailers (figuratively speaking)  were a bit of a surprise to some, although there was plenty of warning that these things were bare, unfurnished, and certainly not new compared to what we have become inured to; sign of the times - tighten those belts people!

So here are the prelims, based on our electronic submission and confirmation from the ARRL. They're still preliminary and we don't have the final tally on bonus points yet. This year should not have been surprising since we seem to be lingering in a solar minimum which has gone on now for at least a year longer than anyone would have thought. We labored through FD with precious little E skip, some very snatchy tropo on vhf/uhf, and no long haul propagation to speak of. One bright spot was the CW station worked and, we just got a confirming QSL, for one of the two States FARA needs for a WAS certificate. Hawaii is now confirmed and we only have Alaska to go. It was exciting to find some KL7's logged during FD but they were either logged wrong or they identified incorrectly because they were certainly not located in the land of huge Kodiak bears and parking meters with engine block warmer outlets in them. The two worked where in 4 land. All in all, considering that last year we had phenomenal E skip, and this year not only were we still slogging through the dregs of the solar minimum, but E skip was nothing to write home about, we didn't fare too badly in the QSO's department. The bonus points left quite a bit to be desired because we didn't make quite a few of those this year.

2009 (2A)

2008 (2A)

2007 (2A)

2006 (2A)

CW

Phone

185

95

183

270

194

2363

3783

2

7566

1160

8726

2A

* claimed