Category Archives: Field Day

Preliminary Plans for Field Day 2017

Quote

Posted on by

 

We are a little under 4 months from Field Day 2017, so we need to start our initial planning.

Of course, some things will be the same, OCRA and the DFMA will run a joint operation. The Lamb Family once again will be hosting the location, we will again run an “Alpha Battery” club operation. That means transmitted output will be no greater than 5 Watts, all transceivers will be on on battery power. How many stations we run will need to be determined, returning band captains get the “right of first refusal”, and then we can fill slots for non-returnees as well as welcome some trying something new. We do get 100 bonus points for each HF station on emergency power.

Now for some of the changes:

Food-     Fear not, we will still be eating well! However, after many years of hard work and excellent service, Dee KU4GC and M.K. W4MKR are bowing out of running our field canteen. They are willing to give advice but no longer wish to do the heavy lifting. I believe a committee needs to be formed right away to carry on the planning and staffing of our field canteen. This will be to provide two meals during Field Day operations, a Saturday dinner and a Sunday Breakfast, as well as have water , soft drinks and snacks available throughout the weekend. John KM4MDR has volunteered to coordinate the huge potluck which is held on that Friday night, which is one of the two largest social events we hold each year (the Holiday Dinner being the other). If you have an interest in working on the committee, let us know!

Logging-     The other change will be in how we will be logging results. In the past , we had used several different logging programs with a ADIF output capability. The output was never completely compatible, so not all of the logs would integrate into the master log. This meant many hours of editing and formatting had to be done by me to pull a master log together. The CW operators have been using the N1MM freeware logger, which allows multiple computers to simultaneously make log entries via a wireless connection. I asked if this capability could be extended across the whole Field Day site, and it can be done.  If the entire Field Day operation enters into one master log, my work in preparing our FD submission will be much easier. You would also be able to watch the results for the entire operation in real time. This means that all logging computers must have wireless capability. Also, all of us will have to learn how to use the N1MM software. Bruce, N1LN has agreed to give a tutorial at an upcoming meeting, I am looking forward to that.

Bonus Points-     One reason our closest competitor in California keeps beating us, is that they strongly pursue all the bonus points they can get. Some members in the past have taken on various bonus activities. I strongly recommend that we put together a bonus point committee to help coordinate these activities, and explore ways to get even more points added without overburdening anyone.

As always, I eagerly anticipate our operation.  We have a corps of dedicated, technically gifted amateurs, who enjoy each other’s company, I can’t wait to see what we come up with this year!

73–  Dave W4SAR

OCRA/DFMA Groups.io Photo Upload Procedure

Posted on by

A new Photo section has been recently activated for all subscribers to OCRA-DFMA@groups.io.

If you haven’t tried it yet and have some good Field Day or other amateur radio event photos, here is a demonstration of the procedure.

If you are logged in to groups.io, this link  https://groups.io/g/OCRA-DFMA/photos will take you direct to the OCRA/DFMA groups.io photos gallery.

Or, from the groups.io home page click on the   tab to go to the photos home page. You will see several albums already on the site e.g. 2018 OCRA/DFMA Field Day, 2018 Field Day Potluck, and others.

You can create a new album by clicking on the blue New Album tab  or you can click on an existing album to add your photos.

A couple of thoughts about opening new albums:

  • The reason the “2018….. ” albums shown above are listed first is that the site lists albums in alphabetical order.
  • If you do choose to open another album the name ought to start off with consistent naming with the albums already in existence, otherwise the albums for the same event will be scatttered though out the whole library of photo albums.
  • Lastly, you might want to consider adding your photos to an already existing album to avoid viewers having to open many different albums to see all the photos related to a specific event. Each photo within an album will show and give credit to who uploaded the photo to the album.

To select an existing album, click on the photo 

To upload a photo(s) click on  and the Upload Photos window will open.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

  • While you may have used a photo image viewer or your operating system file manager to preview  and select the photos you wish to upload, before attempting to upload those photos in the steps below, you need to close those applications. Otherwise those photos can be locked by the open applications and not available to the upload process. There will be no pop up messages to indicate this has occurred. The symptom will be that when you click on the blue “Add” tab below, nothing happens.
  • Lastly if you select a large number of photos to upload, take into account your ISP upload speed. For most internet services, the upload speed is typically 1/10 of your download speed.  So if you select a large number of images, whose size can be considerable with the pixel count of today’s cameras, it may take a while for the upload to complete.

After you have clicked on the above “Add Photos”, click on the “Browse” tab and a “File Upload” window will open as shown below.

Select the photo(s) you wish to upload and then click on the “add” button.

You browser application should give some indication that it is busy uploading.

After the upload process is complete, your newly added photos will be visible in the album.