A Personal Record: Winter Field Day 2025

I have done Winter Field Day every year since I became a ham. With a radio club in a rain storm (2020), in a museum train caboose in 0℉ weather (2021), in a severe blizzard in a tent in our backyard (2022), with another radio club in rustic cluster of cabins (2023), at the outbuilding on our off-grid farm (2024), and finally, in a comparatively luxurious tiny RV again on our land in Upstate New York (2025, this report!) I published our WFD 2025 checklist in this post.

Like we did for our very successful ARRL Field Day last June, we set up two 80M OCFD antennas. One was running in a north-to-south configuration in that treeline visible out the window of the travel trailer. If you look closely you can see part of the 200′ of coax we used to get back to the temporary shack. The coax ran in through the window and we used pipe insulation in order to keep the freezing cold outdoors outside. It is hard to see, but using a space heater we were able to keep the temperature inside the trailer at a comfortable low 60s°F. The other 80M OCFD was set up in a perpindicular treeline, with roughly an “L”-shape formed between the two antennas. We used bandpass filters to minimize interference. These antennas gave us each access to all HF bands from 80M to 10M with an external tuner.

For the RV enthusiasts out there that are curious, we were powering the RV with a 3500W generator which was giving us AC, however for reasons that we are still a bit unsure of, our trailer was not converting the generator AC power to DC. The RV’s onboard furnace (along with its lights and most other major appliances) runs on DC. We could not run the furnace without draining the trailer’s 75Ah battery given its 11A draw. We do have a solar panel which was providing some daytime energy (about 24W), but it would not be enough and certainly would not help at night. We have to do some trouble shooting on the RV’s converter (if it even has one! We actually could not find it.) At this point, we suspect we blew a fuse earlier in the year. Regardless, we had no problem being comfortable with the one electric space heater plugged in to AC. If we tried plugging in two space heaters, we would trip the RV’s main breaker. Ok, back to radio!

Georgia the Peaches, our one-eyed pirate puppy who is now two years old and seventy pounds had no problem curling up in a sleeping bag inherited from her beloved predecessor Nellie. I will mention, that our quarters were incredibly…cozy(?)…for two adults and a dog that stands taller than 5 feet when she is up on her back two legs. Georgie is also an incredibly demanding dog, so there were a lot of pauses in radio focus to keep up with her needs.

That said, AA1F and I had a very good showing. We made 339 total contacts, with 30 of those CW with the rest phone. We met a whole bunch of Winter Field Day multipliers including operating: 100% on alternative power (+1), away from home (+3), with multiple antennas deployed (+1), on at least six bands (+6), while use multiple modes (+2), and six continuous hours during the event (+2). You can see a lot of our stats below.

All of our QSOs are show in the map below. We did get a few DX stations…the most impressive of which was Japan on 10M CW!

Below you can see the North American contacts we made with the various bands in different colors. We managed to get all but a handful of states in the log.

And again, you can see the contacts we made this time by mode.

And a rough KM1NDY early Sunday morning (okay, by early I mean around noon), selfie just ‘cuz… Poor AA1F, he was there, and I didn’t manage to get a single picture of him. Neither of us took many pictures…we were way too busy making contacts!

I loved this Winter Field Day! It was my best contest radio showing ever when it comes to number of contacts. We had a few problems…infrastructure-wise we were not converting AC generator current to DC for reasons that are not quite clear yet. Radio-wise, we lost the network connection between our two computers. My process for networking have been documented here and here. I used an ethernet cable connecting the two computers this time. I think what happened was I tried to switch my computer over to JS8Call, losing the connection from the radio to the computer in the process. This somehow led to the contest information in N1MM changing, and most importantly, no longer matching that in AA1F’s computer. N1MM therefore no longer would recognize the two computers as part of the same contest network. Unfortunately I was not able to troubleshoot this during WFD, and AA1F and I ended up mostly logging separately. This created a lot of work to fix the logs for submission, which I did last night.

Otherwise, the radio stations and antenna system worked very well. In fact, at the last half hour or so of the contest I was able to successfully run a station on 20M and hold my own on a frequency on upper side band. The cabling for each antenna was a 100′ run of LMR400 combined with a 100′ run of RG8X. It may be worth investing in more LMR400 because I do believe it makes a difference.

Another important note is we ran our stations off of 15Ah Bioenno LiFePo batteries. Believe it or not, for the ENTIRE operation, we only used 2 batteries each while putting out a full 100W. Our computers and other peripherals were plugged in to generator power. These batteries really are amazing.

Well, another Winter Field Day in the books! We are already excited about ARRL Field Day, and are setting a goal of at least 200 contacts apiece! We will see!

As always,
KM1NDY