We’re in the final stretch of Field Day planning, and everything is coming together. Setup will begin at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday morning.

We’re going to be at a new site this year: Spanish Village Park in Bridgeton (Google Maps link). It’s a bit more tight quarters than we’re used to, but I think we’ve got a workable plan to squeeze everything in. You are welcome — encouraged, in fact — to pay us a visit.

You can also use the ARRL Field Day Locator to find our site, as well as any other planned Field Day operation, anywhere in the country. Currently there are more than 1,000 entries on the map!

We’ll have three primary CW operating stations: 40m, 20m, and 15m/80m (switching bands between day and night). We will also be checking 10m for activity and working there too. We’re also going to give FT8 a go — Vern AE0TT will have a full setup, all QRP and battery-powered.

Another first will be computer logging. We’re going to be using N3FJP’s ARRL Field Day Contest Log software. We had a Zoom meeting last evening to run through the features and it was well-received. I’m pretty excited about this. For years we’ve been using a pretty clever method to log and dupe our contacts on paper… each band position had a 10-page 3-ring binder with a page for each section. For all its functionality it was still pretty cumbersome. So I’m hopeful this will go pretty smoothly. It will certainly speed up the score reporting when Field Day is done!

Weather: hm. We’ve been really lucky for the past few years, with unusually cool and dry FD conditions. Looks like our luck is running out in this category. This year the Old Farmer’s Almanac’s Long Range Forecast has been telling us that Field Day weekend will be “Isolated t-storms, warm.” And that’s essentially what their 5-day forecast is saying. So it will be a little moist and sticky. We’ll have fans to keep the air moving, tarps to deflect rain away from the gazebo… we’re prepared for typical St. Louis summer!