It’s Field Day! The second most wonderful time of the year when the field day aardvark leaves new radio equipment and other surprises for all the good little radio operators up on the roof or at the base of the antenna tower, all over the world.
Well, that is, after the commercialization of the holiday.
The true meaning of field day is to get out, away from home and operate a portable or mobile amateur radio station and talk to as many stations as possible, hopefully a few far away ones. Extra points for solar or alternative energy use.
Radio is a fun hobby that can be inexpensive if you learn how to build all or some of your own equipment. Communication can be by cw (morse code), single side band (voice) or any of the many new digital modulation techniques such as PSK-31.
Last year the most distant station with which I exchanged QSL cards with was a New Zealand station, from the car with SSB on 20 meters (14 Mhz) at lunchtime.
Happy DX’ing.