Location: Washington Monument State Park (Middletown, Maryland)

Date: June 28-29, 2014

The crew: 2014 attendees left to right: N2AW, W3MIT, AG6DF, K3MZ, KN3U, W4TG, WA3PYU, AJ1DM, N3IC, WA3KLK, WA3IRQ, Logan; Not shown: W3CID, KI3C, WA3LTJ, KB3UNL, KG4URX, Nikolai, KI4LGI, KG4NXZ, Emily.

Watch the Big Brother video to see the shelter setup. Field Day wouldn't be Field Day without the generator.

Al was our power guru: he brought the quietest generator we've barely heard and two battery / charging systems. On top of the left shot is the master networked N1MM logging laptop.

This shot best shows the whole shelter arrangement: at left is the cw (front) and phone (rear) main stations; at right is the GOTA station; and in the foreground is the VHF/UHF station. Food supplies at the shelter's rear adjacent to the fireplace.

Set the tents up in the daylight to prepare for the coming night: Drew supevises Robert who is supervising the battery pump inflating the air mattress; Bob; and Eli.

Two views of the 20 meter yagi beam atop Frank's "Ladder" tower.

The triband beam atop Frank's "Rocket Launcher".

The 40 meter dipole down in the field (not shown: the 80 meter vee and 40 meter moxon).

Paul on cw, Mike on phone (eyes closed assists in cutting through QRM), John on GOTA.

Bob on cw, John on phone; Al coaches Nikolai on GOTA.

Alas, MDC section manager Jim Cross WI3N made it to the gate of the park -- but it was after the park closed and they didn't know about the back entrance! Sorry, Jim. We'll look forward to better communications next year.

We went with two transmitters. QSO breakdown:

80 phone - 237
40 phone - 450
20 phone - 635
15 phone - 23
10 phone - 0
6 phone - 8
2 phone - 6
432 phone - 0
80 cw - 168
40 cw - 485
20 cw - 426
15 cw - 0
10 cw - 0
GOTA phone - 412
GOTA cw - 3

Some additional aggravations this year! I pulled the N1MM file from the Master laptop (plus the GOTA one) and not the individual phone and cw machines. The first phone station laptop crashed -- plus somehow it had not transferred its data to the Master laptop -- and wouldn't even reboot to reclaim the log! Frank pulled the drive and extracted the file; I merged the files to retrieve Drew's starting 56 QSO's. After all the scoring and spreadsheets were completed, I looked at the QSO rate histogram and noticed that there was only one contact in hour 7 on phone. Frank said that there wasn't that long of a gap switching in the replacement phone laptop. So he sent me the file from that computer. Another three hours of conversion, inspection, and merging files gave us 36 more phone QSO's -- had to redo all of the spreadsheet data. Note for next year: we must verify that the Master is communicating properly with both phone and cw machines before the contest starts. And resync the Master to them before copying the data.

1. N3IC 350 cw (700 equivalent points)
2. N2AW 312 cw (624 equivalent points)
3. KI3C 217 cw (434 equivalent points)
4. K3MZ 200 cw, 7 phone (407 equivalent points)
5. WA3KLK 352 phone (352 equivalent points)
6. WA3LTJ 293 phone (293 equivalent points)
7. WA3PYU 212 phone (212 equivalent points)
8. W4TG 210 phone (210 equivalent points)
9. AJ1DM 146 phone (146 equivalent points)
10. KN3U 134 phone (134 equivalent points)
11. W3MIT 100 phone, 2 cw (104 equivalent points)
12. W3CID 101 phone, 1 RTTY (103 equivalent points)
13. KB3UNL 47 phone (47 equivalent points)
14. Logan 34 phone (34 equivalent points)
15. Nikolai 25 phone (25 equivalent points)
16. AG6DF 22 phone (22 equivalent points)
17. KG4URX 22 phone (22 equivalent points)
18. WA3IRQ 21 phone (21 equivalent points)
19. KI4LGI 20 phone (20 equivalent points)
20. Emily 20 phone (20 equivalent points)
21. Joshua 1 phone (1 equivalent point)
22. John H 1 phone (1 equivalent point)