On the bench:

2012-Jun-22 - Field Day 2012 in the Catskill Mountains

The view from Giant Ledge in the Catskills

This year my son and I went camping in the Catskill mountains. We hiked up to Giant Ledge on the shoulder of Panther Mountain. It was a perfect day, with no humidity and temperatures about 25C. I carried the Gateway40 homebrew transceiver, a telescoping mast and a 40m dipole. This was the first time that I had carried a mast. Usually I just throw a wire up in a tree. The mast was a Black Widow "Crappie" fishing Rod from Bass Pro Shops. It was very inexpensive and telescopes to about 17'. I bought the 20' version but discarded the thinnest section. The dipole was taped to the top section with black electrical tape. The two legs of the dipole act as two guys. I added a third guy so that the mast would stand freely.

The homebrew rig puts out about 4 watts with a 12 volt gel cell battery. It was very difficult to make contacts with such low power on SSB. I made about three contacts during the hour that we sat on the ledge. We had a perfect view across the meteor crater, the largest in New York State, to the crater rim 5 km away.

I didn't want to operate for too long, because the day was mainly about going for a hike, so I just operated during lunch. It was much easier to make contacts on CW and I later added a couple into the log, including VE3, Ontario in Canada.

Panther Meteor Crater

Next year I think I will take the 50 watt PA. It's very light. My only challenge - it runs off 24 volts. I would need to take two gel cell batteries, which would add to the weight of the station. I think it would be worthwhile. Having more power would have made a big difference to the number of contacts that I could make. I could have logged many more in the hour.

Next year I would also try to arrive at the peak of our hike later in the day. I started operating right as field day kicked off at 2pm Eastern Time. It was chaos. Everyone started calling the loud stations and it was very difficult to be heard. Most of them had multiple callers.

Panther Mountain is in the center of an ancient meteor impact crater. It's 10km across and we were almost in the center. It's the largest impact crater in New York state. You can see from the topo map that the stream almost runs in a circle around the crater.

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