Winter Field Day 2022

Yours truly participating in Winter Field Day. (Photo: N3JEC)


 I've participated in the ARRL's Field Day for the past couple of years, but never Winter Field Day until this past weekend.

Held at Nockamixon State Park in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, this Winter Field Day operation was done under the aegis of the Young Amateurs Radio Club (YARC) of which I am a member, and was overseen by Charlie, K3NOP who coordinated the whole event. 

I left Massachusetts Friday morning and after a 5 hour drive, arrived in the late afternoon at the park. I helped to set up antennas as soon as I arrived. While the even didn't start till 2pm EDT the next day, I got up at 2am after failing to fall asleep and was joined by N3JEC with our respective FT-991As and started playing radio early.

W1PAC and N3JEC playing radio at 2am in the morning.

The next day the contest got underway and we were off and running doing digital and voice as a 4 India station. At some points we had 3 operators at operating at the same time. There were also technical glitches at times, such as stepping on each other when transmitting resulting in one or multiple radios getting a lot of noise on HF.

Also, we weren't the only hams in the park, it turns out, that another group was at the other end of the cabin area playing around. We happened by chance upon them when we heard my Anytone 868 which had one of the VFOs set to 146.52 simplex and heard someone calling out! We invited them down to check out our cabin at some point, which they did. We also invited other Philly areas hams to join us of which only a few did, mostly because of the snowstorm (which was a blizzard here back in Massachusetts) left the roads a little less to be desired.

Not only did we have radios operating, but we held a Volunteer Examiner session that anyone could attend. We had at least one person upgrade to Extra! Congrats KC3SAI!

Anyways, I had an awesome time, and I hope to do it again next year! Here's the list of operators:
  • K3NOP, Charlie
  • WX0A, Amelia
  • N3JEC, Johnathan
  • W1PAC, Patrick
  • KC3SAI, Sean
Also in attendance and a great help were:
  • AJ3DI, Jim
  • K3CL, Charlie
  • W4KEK, Grant
  • N1LC, Lamonte
  • W4GMN, Dan
Lastly, YARC had a claimed score of 4,020. Let's see what the final results say!

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