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| On January 24, 2026. |
So the four have crossed the finish line.
There was something else I was doing on Saturday afternoon, related to my other recent hobby:
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| From Icom America's Instagram feed. Uh, and apparently an AI generated pic with an Icom amateur radio. Who'd have thought? |
Winter Field Day is one of the big contest days in the US Amateur Radio community. Typically, clubs will get together and go outside somewhere to make as many unique contacts as possible; some clubs really get into the competition of it, while others simply are there to enjoy their time together and do some radio stuff while they're there.
Luckily for my club, our facilities at the Red Cross building count as being away from your own home for purposes of the contest, so I got to experience Winter Field Day without freezing my ass off. (Or getting snowed in, which was also a possibility this weekend.) As the weather got progressively worse Saturday night, the club made the decision to go home and call it for Sunday, because the weather had just become too untenable.
So I dabbled in two of my hobbies on Saturday, which worked out well overall.
Perhaps a silly question, but what do you do in an amateur radio contest? What is it you compete on?
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, it's not silly at all! When I first figured it out, I thought "That's it? You have GOT to be kidding me!"
DeleteIn an amateur radio contest the goal is to make as many contacts as possible. There's a central location where you can upload your contact logs for verification (and checking for duplicate contacts), and that's usually handled by the organization holding the competition. Some people go absolutely bonkers, just like some of the hardcore players in MMOs, but others are more casual and social about it.
Yes, just making a contact doesn't exactly sound that interesting, but the point is to make a bunch, so there's a certain protocol to it. One person is calling out on an amateur radio frequency that they want to establish a contact ("CQ CQ CQ, Winter Field Day, this is [insert callsign here], calling CQ CQ CQ"), and people respond and attempt to get the attention of the initiator ([insert responder's callsign]). In a contest there can be what's known as a "pileup" of people attempting to make a contact at the same time, and the initiator gets to sort it all out. If you've ever heard people talking over each other in a chatroom or on CB radio, that's the idea.
So, you make contact, the initiator recognizes you by saying your callsign and the bare minimum to acknowledge the contact (basically how your signal is) and then the two say "thanks and goodbye" to each other (the lingo is "73" in amateur radio terms), and then the initiator moves on to the next person in the pileup.
Me, I worked digital signals during Winter Field Day, so I didn't get on a microphone, but some of the digital signals myself and another ham were trying to make intelligible were kind of right up my alley. Kind of ironic that all of my years in IT looking through logs for clues as to what went wrong on a server suddenly came in handy here.
Sitting next to me was one ham who was, quite literally, hamming it up while he worked some of the amateur radio shortwave frequencies, and on my other side was a ham who was working Morse Code. I was in awe of her working the Morse Code key to put out signals, because I simply don't have that skill.
There were another couple of hams putting up what's known as a Ham Clock up on the big television monitor in the radio room, showing (among other things) a map of the world that also showed all of the active contacts at that time pointing to our location. It was being run by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W connected to the internet via wifi, and it basically runs itself up on the screen.
The funny thing is that I signed up for 2 hours, figuring that was more than enough time to get my feet wet, but when I finally came up for air 3.5 hours had passed. I was so engrossed in everything that was going on that I lost track of time.