FIELD DAY 2022 By John E. Gercken, AA9UF I was all excited about this year's Field Day exercise because I thought I was going to have two friends come over to participate. My brother, Glenn, N0PNQ, could not come this year because he had just gotten out of the hospital from surgery. One doctor friend of mine, Dr. James Derk, said he would come over, but he did not bring his radio. His radio was an SDR affair, all operated by computer. He pretty much wanted to check out my station, I think. Well he was blown away by what he saw, but he only stayed about 2 hours. He said he is in the middle of building a deck on his house and wanted to make some headway while the sun was shining. The good news is that he is looking forward to next year's Field Day. I gave him a short tutorial on making contacts. I started out by using FLDIGI software for doing PSK31 and other digital modes but I quickly found that the radio (Icom-7300) would not talk nice with my computer. No matter what com port I used, they just would not play nice in the CAT department. The PTT worked fine. Seeing that I was not going to make any contacts using FLDIGI, I opted to use Airlink Express. It played nice with the radio but I could not get anyone to hear me even with 60 watts being thrown at them. I was getting desperate now. I started MixW and got it configured for Field Day. Everything worked but when I hit the SAVE button after a contact, the information would NOT go into the on-screen log bar. It would go into the full logbook instead. I knew what causes this from previous experience. The dates and times of the contest period need to changed. The start time needs to read 6/25/2022 18:00:00 and the end time needs to read 6/26/2022 20:59:00. I made the changes but the darn thing STILL would not work. I finally decided to "crash" for the night at around 10:30 pm because I was so tired and frustrated. About an hour later, another thunderstorm went through and dumped a bunch more rain on us, about 1.5". Then at about 3:00 am, my wife called me on the intercom saying that our 16 year-old Border Collie, Kate, aka "Poochy Dog" had diarrhea and pooped all over the back hall. Guess who got to clean it up. That took me 45 minutes. Since I was already up, I decided to work some more Field Day stations. I tried 20 and 40 meters but no luck there. I went back to the recliner for another nap. Maybe God will intervene and fix MixW for me. I prayed. I have run out of ideas. After my "clean up" detail, I turned my MixW program back on and much to my surprise and delight, IT WORKED! The callsigns went into the log bar like they were supposed to and stayed that way through the rest of the contest! I give God the credit for this. I checked 20 and 40 meters for activity but there was next to nothing there, so I left the radio on just enough that I could hear it if signals were present. At around 6:00 am, I heard activity, so I quickly moved from the recliner to the ham desk chair and started working stations on 20 meters using PSK31 mode. It got to be so hectic that I could not work them fast enough! Some stations would not let me get finished with one station before they would start calling me! I wasn't complaining....just grinning from ear-to-ear! Of the 84 Field Day sections, I worked 42. I worked a lot of stations east of the Mississippi River but not much was forth coming out of the northwest. Of course, with all my problems I had to deal with, I probably missed out on some good DX. But, with the short time I had left, I ended up with53 contacts. I was hoping to maybe get some RTTY contacts and some on 6 meters but none was to be had. It is strange how things vary from year to year. One mode or another seems to be dominant and one region of the country will have more activity than another. Often, the wee hours of the morning such as 3 to 5 am would be totally dead but once the Sun comes up, it is a totally different story. Stations would come out of the northwest, southwest and the plains. Then the closer to Noon it gets, the signals fade away. Now that the 2022 Field Day event is in the history books, plans for next year are already rolling around in my brain. The first thing I want to do is build an extension on my hitch on the truck or my lawnmower to accommodate the generator. Both of them are about 12" too high. I also want to get a better canopy to put up over the generator. The one I have is a piece of junk and quite old. I would like to find one that can be put up by one man, if there is such a thing. I don't bend very well anymore and my balance leaves a lot to be desired, but I keep trying.