Pres Says – July 2025
Happy 4th of July! However you celebrate the Fourth, may it be safe and enjoyable. For me it will be a quiet BBQ dinner with my wife, and later watching the ‘bigger than they should be’ fireworks going off around my neighborhood.
Can you believe we just completed Field Day 2025? It seemed so far in the future, and now it is behind us. Regular readers of my posts know I mark the passage of time with the Fourth of July, then Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Day. This year is half over and soon the holidays will be upon us.
Field Day 2025 is one of our Club’s big events for the year, the other being Decemberfest. This Field Day was fantastic as usual even with lower visitor attendance. Held once again at Oxnard College, we matched last year’s size as a 13A station though many regular attendees could not participate. Thankfully a lot of new participants joined in the fun. The camaraderie and food could not have been better. Speaking of food, we bought WAY too much. Next year we’ll have to figure out a way to get an accurate head count, and we will likely eliminate 1 or more meals. This year we skipped Saturday lunch entirely as everyone was too full from the big breakfast!
My personal goal this year was to see if we could operate without interfering with each other, a common issue with the small field we use, by spacing out antennas. Since I was running the GOTA station on 20M, that was the band I used. The vertical antenna I was used was a little over 1 wavelength away from the end of KO6FII’s 20M dipole, 1.5 wavelengths away from N3CFx’s Hustler 6BTV, and about 2 wavelengths away from the end of KN6VQ’s fan dipole. N3CFX and KN6VQ were running CW, and KO6FII and I were running SSB.
Results? Strong interference from KO6FII and N3CFX, but none from KN6VQ. What does this mean? We need a bigger place to get our antennas farther apart! The area we use at Oxnard College measures 100 x 250 ft and ARRL FD rules state we need to be within a 1000 ft diameter circle. Anyone know of a bigger place we can use next year? Please start looking and let me or any of the other club officers know what you find.
Thanks to all that made this year’s Field Day possible and enjoyable!
What’s in store for the club in July?
July 11th 7pm Friday at Grace Lutheran Church is our next club meeting. Tim KN6JGB will be giving us an interesting talk on his 2M bicycle build. After the break we will show photos from Field day 2025, plus I’ll be going over our results.
July 19th 8:30am Saturday we will have a VE session at Grace Lutheran Church. We have a lot of slots available so if you’re ready to upgrade and want to take your test in-person, send an email to licensing@vcarc.club to reserve your spot.
July 19th 11am – 2pm Saturday we will have our next ‘Portable Operations and Help’ session. This popular event is a great way to bring out your rig and antenna and play radio. It’s also a great way for new hams, or hams with questions, to come up and get help. Our last few sessions have helped new hams program their hand helds, plus practice getting into our local repeaters. As usual, the club will provide fire (bbq coals) and water for those that want to bring something to cook for themselves.
See you all at the July meetings!
Dave AI6VX
