WFD 2021 Wrapped

 With nice weather today and thunderstorms in the forecast for all day tomorrow, and not wanting to return with a truckload of wet gear, I just treated this year's Winter Field Day as a pleasant afternoon in the Apalachicola National Forest at the Hickory Landing boat launch.  Made about a dozen contacts, most of them digital but some SSB voice, scattered across the 20m & 40m bands.  Also tried 15m & 10m, but they were dead-dead.  Used the lightweight QRP rig, then packed along a bunch of other "well I might use it" crap too.  Even hauling to and from the car, it was too much on the daypack, but it wasn't too far so it all worked out.  Note to self next time: No, you don't need to bring the laptop charger and a spare LiFePO4 batt for a three hour trip to the woods.  Didn't really matter this time though.

Technically WFD runs through to 2pm tomorrow afternoon.  However as previously mentioned, thunderstorms.  Pretty much makes it a wrap, at least for me.

Here, have some pictures:

The river from the campground road.

Artesian well.  Wonder who drilled this one?  And how long's it been running?

The boat ramp.

Another view of the ramp, from farther up.

The gear.  You can just see the feed transformer on the Par EFT-10/20/40 antenna, along with the wire angling upward.  This time out it was pitched as an inverted V, which is how I'd tuned the thing originally. While it's resonant on those three bands, it's kinda narrow on 40.  With the LDG tuner, all of the 40m band is available, along with 15m & 17m -- definitely worth the extra weight and hassle.