Last weekend ARK participated in IARU Region 1 Field Day. In Norway, this contest is more known as National Field Day and is coordinated by the Norwegian Radio Relay League (NRRL). ARK usually treats this as a full three-day social event where we travel to a cabin far away from Trondheim, and treat our members to a nice balance of antenna assembly, food, social exposure and a many new contacts on the radio. This year, we traveled to Fjellvær Gjestegård on Fjellværøya, Hitra.

Our main antenna was a spiderbeam for the 20/15/10 m bands. The mast is turnable by a rotor attached to the bottom.

A custom-built shortened 40m dipole allowed many contacts to Europe. The 40m dipole, nicknamed “bananphone” or “bananantenna”, was mounted on a mast borrowed from Røde Kors.

We also had dipoles for the 80m and 160m bands, mounted between the bananaphone, trees and a lattice mast.

The shacks were set up in one of the cabins and in the truck we used to bring in our equipment.

LB6RH operating 20m on the IC 756 Pro III. An Explorer 1200 allowed for legal limit power.

LB2NH operating the Flex 6500 and Acom 1000 on the 40m band.

LB0VG operating the IC9100 rig on the 80 m band.

FT-1000 Mark V Field being operated by LB4ZH on 15 m. The rig was also used for 160 m during the night.

4O3A band pass filters were employed to reduce self interference. A triplexer also allowed us to operate three bands simultaneously on the spiderbeam.

All our rigs were powered by a portable power generator rented from Aggregatutleie AS.

A portable yagi antenna was used to obtain 4 QSOs over the SO-50 satellite.

In the end, we were able to get just over 1000 QSOs.

Final HF score by band. 20 m was our biggest source for QSOs.

Distribution of QSOs across the 24 contest hours.

Group photo after finishing disassembly showing (almost) all attendees.

Many new operators had the chance to get on the air. We are very happy about the turnout, with a total of 35 people attending the event. A big thank you to LB0VG and LB5DH for organizing the event, and all of the participants for making Field Day such a great trip.

More images, and full resolution of all images, can be seen at http://bilder.la1k.no/fd2017.