This was the 15th Annual Winter Field Day, and it has now become a regular event on the ham radio calendar.....and what an interesting weekend it was.
This year was not without its problems, Covid-19 being the major issue. Just like the ARRL Summer Field Day, many of the participants chose to operate from home as a "1 Hotel" stations. Much like the issues with the "1 Delta" stations last summer, the "1 Hotel" stations overwhelmed the QRP and low power stations to the point some gave up and simply went home.
The event is called Winter FIELD DAY. Yet, of the 70 stations I logged over the weekend, only 9 were operating outdoors. The rest were home based stations using multi-kilowatt amps and huge commercial antennas. This is not the spirit of Field Day, either Summer or Winter.
Did I have a hard time with 100w and a EFHW antenna? Yes I did. It was extremely hard to break the pileups and it was impossible to hear the QRP and low power stations as everyone trampled all over them. It didn't help that the bands went dead around 0100 UTC and stations struggles even more to make contacts.
However, as bad as things got I still managed on Sunday morning QSOs with Fernando PY4BZ, and HH2AA, the Haitian Amateur Radio Club Station, both on 20m.
Winter Field Day has, since the beginning, been proud of the fact that it is not a contest, but an emergency comms exercise under winter conditions. This year the big guns turned it into a fully-fledged contest and totally ruined the spirit of the event.
I'm hoping the WFD Committee, of which I'm one, will sit down and totally review the rules and make some hard decisions about the future of this event.
I've wanted to participate in this event for several years, but the emphasis on this as an emcomm event has discouraged me. I would tend to agree neither this or the summer Field Day is a hardcore contest event, but ironically I wouldn't call the summer Field Day an emcomm event. I think winter Field Day would get a lot more widespread appeal if the focus on it as an emcomm event would be lessened.
ReplyDeleteBut it is an Emcomm event......it's NOT a contest....why would we lie and say it isn't ?? And to be very honest I'm very tired of contesters trying to turn this event into another useless contest. If you're not interested in Emcomm then don't take part....it's really that easy. There's other contests that weekend for you to take part in.
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