Field Day 2020 is now in the log. As so many others did, I operated from home, class 1E, aggregating my score with Newport County Radio Club. Good thing I spent a bunch of time on my bonus points, because I only managed to work 80 stations in four hours running QRP on CW and FT8. I was expecting to work several hundred, so I fell far short of my goal.
I’m making excuses, of course, but this Field Day was vastly different. Usually a 1D or 1E stations is a rarity, with almost everyone in the field with clubs. This year, the bands were saturated with them. Many were obviously running amplifiers and no doubt had access to fine antenna arrays. That meant the more modest stations had an almost impossible task to maintain a RUN frequency, not that I ever expected to do that as I was running 5 watts to an inverted-L. The other difference was the skill levels shown on-air were not up to par, with folks often rambling, failing to give proper exchanges, etc.
Still it was a joy to be back on CW again, and I enjoyed those contacts far more than the ones I made with FT8. The 20 minutes spent copying the ARRL Field Day Bulletin on CW as probably a wash. It was worth 100 points as a bonus but those 20 minutes likely could have produced a few more points making CW contacts.
Sadly, I was only able to work my club station, NE1RI, on 6-meter FT8. Never heard them on any other band. Usually a dominant force in the top 5 or 10 nationally, I know they were struggling to maintain a RUN frequency as well.
