Discussion for Field Day 2022 from WB5AOH This also documents alternate and emergency power bonuses. Third year in a row where I stayed home avoiding the virus and running field day from my home station, in this case again as class 1E STX, battery/solar power, and 100 percent alternate power, disconnected from commercial power. This is much of a repeat method and plan from the two previous years. The overall strategy, unchanged from previous years is to run only mode FT8, on 5W QRP with 100 percent solar/battery alternate emergency power to make 10 points/QSO, and only to make improvements to operating skill and trying to cover 7 bands. Im addition I copied the W1AW bulletin on digital modes, and to earn the extra 50 points from online submission. I am donating all of my points to the local Austin ARC (W5KA), which is in excess of 100 years young. I made one major improvement in operating skill on FT8 from last year, which is to leave the TX audio freq in place instead of mistkenly chase trying to match freq of stations calling CQ. When I did that, I found it MUCH easier to keep QRP power levels near to 5 watts since the TX pass band isn't any flatter than the RX passband, and that is the way it was designed to work, I just didn't quite understand it until just after last years operation was complete and I critiqued it. I did shift TX around a bit to avoid obvious QRM collisions on the display. In this case there was a major complication. The battery bank in the solar system ran out late in the night at almost exactly 16 hours into the field day operations. I aborted it at that point. I could have chosen to continue operations on commercial power as class 1D, but I would lose lots of points, so I just started recovering the system, but not remaining on the air. Last year I had 100 qsos in 24 hours. This time, after improving many things, I had 83 qsos in 16 hours. Had I been able to continue, I think I could proabbly achieved maybe 120 or more. The battery bank is now about 5 years old. However after looking around, I discovered that I had an extra desktop computer on that circuit that I should have shed onto commrcial housepower, and I also discovered a vent fan running on it that I should have either turned off at night or disconneced. To repeat discussion from previous years, the solar rooftop and battery system is treated as a sort of emergency backup power system from the start from about 15 yers or so ago. One of the critical loads I feed with it is the ham radio gear, but it is not the only load, I include other computers, the lan network, emergency lights and so forth. The system is roughly a 3KW system, but with less than 2 KW of PV panels which are starting to show their age and degradation. I typically see about 1700 watts of DC input to the system in the middle of every sunny afternoon, and I normally run the service meter backwards for a few hours per day. I am NOT part of the peak load on the TX grid, I am part of the solution. The system is set up so that I can just open one tie circuit breaker and separate that system from commercial power, and usually without any interruption, which was the case this time also. Everything worked fine until the battery ran out and the system tripped out on low battery voltge, as it is properly designed to do in order to protext the battery from unrecoverable deep discharge which would destroy the battery itself. When I opened up the tie breaker in mid morning, with good sunlight available, the system immediately went into heavy charge mode which it is intended to do. I did make one change from the previous years in that I rebuilt the radio room operating position itself. I discarded a huge corner office desk that took up too much room and was very inconvenient to work on or reach the rear of any radio gear. I built a wood rack, something of a deep shelf bookcase with open back that I can access the back of the gear, and the cables. I also fabricated an aluminum surge protection and single point grounding panel for all of the antenna coax entering the radio equipmwent. It is bonded to the branch circuit power ground, and also is bonded to the external lightning protection ground. In this case, the house has a sheet metal roof which is grounded to individual ground rods on all four corners of the house, to which all of the solar PV panels and all of the antenna masts are connected, and is ultimately interconnected to both the power entrance grounds and copper water pipes. It resembles a skeleton faraday cage for the whole house. The rest of the antennas and PV system is unchanged from previous years. For the record and to explain the discharge failure, I kept an hourly log of the battery bank voltage. This is a nominal 48 volt system using 8 each 6 volt wet batteries in series, an usually floats around 50 to 52 volts. Here is a snapshot of it: local 24 hour time, and volts DC 2140 - 49.1v 2300 - 48.7v 0001 - 48.5v 0100 - 48.2v 0200 - 47.7v 0300 - 47.4v 0400 - 46.8v 0500 ' 42.0v Note the very abnormal low reading of 42 volts at 0500 hours. As I was actually observing it, the meter momentarily dropped to 41.9v, followed immediately as I was watching by the tripout, and I proceeded to declare the operation aborted, and proceeded to secure what was left. I should add for the record, that I DO happen to have a separate 12 volt wet battery floating on the actual power supply for the radio gear rack itself. It DID work to keep the radios running after the main supply collapse, but it doesn't run the computer gear necessary for FT8. However, in an emergency, this battery would have allowed me to run for a while on voice if it were necessary. In fact, I have a single emergency fluorescent light atop the radio rack and it DID switch on for awhile until I restored things, so there is lots of redundancy in the radio station itself. As for the operation itself, I was able to actually work many stations on 80, 40 and 20 meters, and one local station on 2M. I had previously prepared and tested operations on 80-40-20-15-10-6-2M, all on digital mode FT8. If necesary I can also operate on 60-30-17 and 12M but it is irrelevant for FD. I happen to have a 20M mobile whip style vertical antenna on top of the metal oof, but the main antenna is what appears as an inverted vee, about long enough for 60M, in a very cramped space beside the house, and very near to the radio gear itself. I use only about 20 feet of twinlead to feed it via a tuner which includes a balanded output using an isolation transformer connected toroid. HOWEVER, to keep the RF field out of the house, I found it necessary to add a reflector wire element a few feet underneath the dipole. This in effect converts it into a 2 element yagi pointed straight up. As such, it has GAIN, and also rejects a lot of low angle noise and qrm, instead of the excessive RF power losses to the nearby trees, structures, and soil itself, making many DB of improvement in its performance. Prior to adding the reflector, I had lots of RF feedback into all other electronics, and I could barely be heard on the air. I routinely use it on 75M daily. As an NVIS antenna, it can't be beat, it works really well. Since the feedline is extremely well balanced, feedline radiation is about nonexistent, and along with all of that local noise that comes with it. I normally do not hear atmospheric noise unless there is a squall line closer than about 30 miles, while I hear everybody else on the band complaining about static crashes all over Texas when a weather system is taking place. This antenna is unchanged from previous years. During field day, I did switch beteen the 20M vertical and the dipole on 20M and when I went to the dipole, I encountered mostly a new set of stations to work, with no change in freq or mode. and this definitely improved my score on 20M. Might be nice to have one on 15 and 10 also, but that weekend I wasn't hearing any useful FD participating stations on 15, and 10 was dead. I did her some South American DX on 15 for awhile, but nobody running USA FD. I took time off from 20M FT8 to copy the ARRL bulletin on 14095 without retuning. I copied both ARRL stations about equally well, about S3, and there was no qrm, in fact the audio passband for PSK was entirely empty except for W1AW/K6KPH. I assume everybody was on FT8 instead. I copied all three digital mode bulletins from both stations, this time best copy was MFSK16 from W1AW which is what I subnitted as finished (unretouched) proof copy, but I included the raw capture from both sources in case someone at ARRL wants to analyze it. I have a 2el element homebrew rotatable 6M moxon yagi, which I am well pleased with. I had heard many many stations on 6M sporadic E in the week before field day, but the band opened up only partially for an hour or so when field day started, and shut down thereafter, and I only heard local stations on 6M after that. I had some unexplained freq drift behavior with my 6M/2M transverter which kept me from making even local 6M contacts. It seemed to go away when I took the cover off the transverter, and I suspect thermal drift when it is in transmit. I did not make any contacts though after that. Well, they DO call it SPORADIC E. I sort of fantasy I might upgrade from the FT726 to a FT736. HF transceiver is a Kenwood TS450 which I am well pleased with. I also made one single 2M local contact. There were maybe 2-3 other stations, but I wasn't seeing them in time to respond as I was watching HF. I have a small 4 el rotating yagi for 2M. The QTH is essentially in a creek bottom, and HAAT is negative, but I can still use 6M when it is open. 2M is local only unless there is some good tropo opening. I have separate HF and VHF transceivers and interfaces, and running 2 instances of wsjtx on the computer for each transceiver, but I can't watch or TX both at once. I do have the capability to add a second video monitor to it, although it is unclear where I would put the display itself. Running simultaneous transceivers on FT8 is in fact an upgrade from last year. I am submitting a subset of existing photos of the antennas and the PV system, with one new ohoto ot the revised radio gear rack. The rack is mostly my ugly style construction, but it has proven to be very practical, and for the most part was made from existing materials on hand. I did have to add a few new plywood shelves and some small hardware to finish it off. It positively ontributed to a more succesful operation for FD. 73 de Bob Morgan WB5AOH Austin TX wb5aoh@arrl.net