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Field Day!
Jun. 24th, 2012 11:39 am"Field day" is a collocation with multiple meanings.
To farmers, it's a trade show. To Marines and sailors, it is a painstakingly thorough cleaning of some area, though the expression is commonly used as a verb ("You people better 'turn to' and field-day this pig sty!"). In some more genteel communities, a "field day" is a day devoted to sports competitions. In the common idiom, "to have a field day" means, roughly, "to be productive in a satisfying way" (as when the press jumps all over, say, a scandal).
To an amateur radio operator, Field Day is an annual event, held the fourth weekend in June and coordinated by the American Radio Relay League. (How do you have a "day" event over a weekend? Easy! Have the event start Saturday at 1800 UTC—aka Greenwich standard time—and last until 2059 UTC on Sunday.)
I attended my first (and still only) amateur radio Field Day the year I got my license, back in 1992. I had gone with Andrew, to see if perhaps being exposed to the hurly-burly of CW, SSB, amateur television, contacts with amateur radio satellites, and so on would spark some interest in him about the technical end of the world. Apparently it didn't (at least, not immediately), and six months later, I was caught up in the "Mournful Thursday" layoff at Borland, which resulted in our family leaving California.
It only just happens that this is Field Day weekend, and I only just happened to give a listen to the 40 meter CW band last night (CW stands for "continuous wave," which is used for Morse Code transmissions), and let me tell you, it was really hopping!
When I tried making contacts using CW back in '92, there was still a 5 word-per-minute Morse Code requirement if you wanted to progress from the Novice rank to Technician, and a higher speed (12 wpm, if memory serves) requirement if you wanted to advance to the General class. I distinctly recall how, as I called "CQ" during that Field Day (a reference to a transmission "calling any station"), all of the CW operators I was competing with were pretty much as slow as I was.
My, how times have changed.
Last night, I could only catch a snippet here and there, with the only truly recognizable (to me) code being that for "CQ" itself (dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-di-dah).
* * * Why my fascination with CW, when it's not even a requirement for a ham license anymore? When it's been years since the last Morse key officially went off the air aboard merchant ships? When we've got cell phones and fiber optics and satellite communications and computers and wifi and Twitter and network backbones and ...?
Well, aside from being a fun skill to develop that doubtless works out new sections of gray matter, I am painfully aware (having lived through two Northeast blackouts) that all that good technology can be pretty fragile. Whenever news comes of an event like Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti, you'll often find reports of how, if it wasn't for amateur operators, there wouldn't be any communications. And when things get really harsh, CW—as primitive as it is—is often the only technique that'll get the message through (precisely because it's "primitive").
I suspect the uniformly faster CW I heard last night was an interesting side effect of no longer having a code requirement to get a ham license. After all, operators who do hang out on the CW bands these days are fairly passionate about doing so, and hence, nobody sends at 5 wpm (indeed, the current conventional wisdom is that learners should start learning Morse at 15 wpm or higher). I suspect I didn't hear anything slower than 10-12 wpm during my little eavesdropping session last night. That'll be food for thought as I continue to reacquaint myself with Morse.
Cheers...
To farmers, it's a trade show. To Marines and sailors, it is a painstakingly thorough cleaning of some area, though the expression is commonly used as a verb ("You people better 'turn to' and field-day this pig sty!"). In some more genteel communities, a "field day" is a day devoted to sports competitions. In the common idiom, "to have a field day" means, roughly, "to be productive in a satisfying way" (as when the press jumps all over, say, a scandal).
To an amateur radio operator, Field Day is an annual event, held the fourth weekend in June and coordinated by the American Radio Relay League. (How do you have a "day" event over a weekend? Easy! Have the event start Saturday at 1800 UTC—aka Greenwich standard time—and last until 2059 UTC on Sunday.)
I attended my first (and still only) amateur radio Field Day the year I got my license, back in 1992. I had gone with Andrew, to see if perhaps being exposed to the hurly-burly of CW, SSB, amateur television, contacts with amateur radio satellites, and so on would spark some interest in him about the technical end of the world. Apparently it didn't (at least, not immediately), and six months later, I was caught up in the "Mournful Thursday" layoff at Borland, which resulted in our family leaving California.
It only just happens that this is Field Day weekend, and I only just happened to give a listen to the 40 meter CW band last night (CW stands for "continuous wave," which is used for Morse Code transmissions), and let me tell you, it was really hopping!
When I tried making contacts using CW back in '92, there was still a 5 word-per-minute Morse Code requirement if you wanted to progress from the Novice rank to Technician, and a higher speed (12 wpm, if memory serves) requirement if you wanted to advance to the General class. I distinctly recall how, as I called "CQ" during that Field Day (a reference to a transmission "calling any station"), all of the CW operators I was competing with were pretty much as slow as I was.
My, how times have changed.
Last night, I could only catch a snippet here and there, with the only truly recognizable (to me) code being that for "CQ" itself (dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-di-dah).
Well, aside from being a fun skill to develop that doubtless works out new sections of gray matter, I am painfully aware (having lived through two Northeast blackouts) that all that good technology can be pretty fragile. Whenever news comes of an event like Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti, you'll often find reports of how, if it wasn't for amateur operators, there wouldn't be any communications. And when things get really harsh, CW—as primitive as it is—is often the only technique that'll get the message through (precisely because it's "primitive").
I suspect the uniformly faster CW I heard last night was an interesting side effect of no longer having a code requirement to get a ham license. After all, operators who do hang out on the CW bands these days are fairly passionate about doing so, and hence, nobody sends at 5 wpm (indeed, the current conventional wisdom is that learners should start learning Morse at 15 wpm or higher). I suspect I didn't hear anything slower than 10-12 wpm during my little eavesdropping session last night. That'll be food for thought as I continue to reacquaint myself with Morse.
Cheers...
