The next meeting of the Story County Amateur Radio Club will be Thursday, May 2, 2013, at 7:30 pm. The meeting will be in Conference Room D next to Bessie Meyers Auditorium on the first floor of Mary Greeley Medical Center (MGMC). The closest parking is in the lot north of the ER and ambulance garage. Enter through the North Door where MGMC meets McFarland Clinic.
The program will be a video entitled “The Last BIG Field Day,” a documentary of the W3AO 50A Field Day operation in 2004 (i.e., 50 stations in class A).
The video will be followed by some discussion of the 2013 SCARC Field Day plans.
From the Amateur Radio Video News web page: The call sign W3AO has appeared in almost every Field Day log since 1999, when the group began an unbroken run at the top of the QST Top 10 box. Members of the Potomac Valley Radio Club and Columbia (MD) Amateur Radio Association assemble an awesome operation, with phone, cw and digital in all bands, satellite, VHF/UHF and all the bonus points a group can rack up. Their entry class is usually in the low to mid 20's. With top contest operators behind the controls, year after year their score is head and shoulders above everyone else.
In 2003 and 2004, though, they were listed in 51A and 50A. Stations they worked had a hard time believing the report they were receiving. Was it real? Was it made up? How does a Field Day operation accomplish 50 or more transmitters? And why has it never been done after 2004?