July 1 is the opening day of the gold dredging season in Wyoming.
This year I decided to combine Field Day with the gold dredging
trip. I have a gold claim in Wyoming near Fox Park and Keystone,
about 40 miles sw of Laramie. This seemed like a great way
to combine 2 hobbies. Below is a shot of the campsite. The
red truck with the funny yellow thing on it is mine. That's
my 4" gold dredge, basically a 4" underwater vacuum cleaner.
All of the other camp sites are gold prospectors. There were
only 3 hams camped there, my friend Steve, myself, and a Technician.
My kitchen is on the right of the picture and you can see we
have plenty of firewood for the night. The flag is on top of
one end of my 40 meter dipole at 20 feet. I also had a 20 meter
dipole at 20 feet. I was aiming for a N/S orientation but I
think I ended up NW/SE from the contacts I made.
Below is our home for the trip. I was there for 2 weeks and operated the whole time. Ham radio made a great addition to camping. I was able to work someone on 20 meters any time I tried.You can see Steve running one of the rigs at our operating position. The mast on the trailer is 20 feet and served as endpoints for the 20 and 40 meter dipoles.
Here you can see one end of the 40 meter dipole. It was the 4th of July so we had to have a flag. We had the largest and the highest flag at the campsite.
Here you can see a little detail of the end of the 40 meter dipole. I operated very little on 40 as it seemed I could always make great QSO's on 20. From now on, I'll only set up the 20 meter dipole.
Here you see me on the left and Ed, a friend and prospective new ham, sitting in the operation position. We had 2 solar panels like the one shown in operation. They were rated at 45 watts and we had a huge battery for backup. We only ran the panels for a few hours a day to top off the battery as we didn't have a charge controller to control battery charge. That is being rectified as I have one on order for my next trip.
How did we do? I ran my bitx20 kit set for 5 watts output and made about 15 contacts. Steve ran my FT-840 running about 80 watts on 40 meters and made about 30 contacts. We really didn't operate a lot of hours. The real pleasure was operation after Field Day was over. I made about 100 contacts using my FT-840 and had many great QSO's lasting 20-30 minutes each. The only DX I worked was Newfoundland and France. I did work some great special events stations including N8SUB, the Silversides submarine in Minnesota and 3 of the 13 Colonies stations on the 4th.
It was a great time and I will include the ham radio rig on every camping expedition I make from now on.