There were many helping hands making this a successful weekend.
Our Radio team consisted of
- Art Lewis WA8VSJ
- Jerry Zaza W4BFL
- Mike Seigel W2RT
- Lou Hodges W9IL
- Jeff Ronner W4AEQ
Our MIS team consisted of
- Jeff Ronner W4AEQ
- Less Kalmus W2LK
- Jerry Zaza W 4BFL
- Bruce Ratoff KO4XL
We were fortunate to have the chef services of
- John Holzapfel KE4IDW
- Kathryn Holzapfel KN4MCB
- Jackson Quarquesso KM4MFZ
The statistics have not been finalized yet but here are some highlights
- Planning for this event began in April of this year
- Our event was made public on Facebook and our website www.brara.org
- We sent invitations to over 27 politicians and government representatives
- We got responses from
- Governor Scott
- Sen Rubio
- Boca Raton Mayor Singer
- Delray Beach Assistant Fire Chief Green
- State Representative Frankel
- Of these invited, we had visits from agency officials of the Red Cross
- We enjoyed three chef prepared meals and various member prepared foods and drinks
- We operated on emergency power from a 5k watt gasoline powered generator
- We also operated on solar charged batteries
- We completed an educational and instructional component where visitors learned about a technical subject area of amateur radio
- We had an FAU student operate successfully for the first time for several hours
- We had over 1730 contacts which is an increase over the 2017 contacts of 1024 for an net change of 68 percent
- We operated CW (morse code), phone (using your voice) and digital PACKET using a computer interface to the radios
- We operated for 24 hours non-stop
- We passed (sent) 13 verbal traffic messages into the national traffic system
- We made at least 2 satellite contacts
- We had 72 possible time slots available to work on 3 radios and all these slots were filled
- Before the event began 85 percent of these slots were reserved by club members
- There were 19 members signed up to act as standby operators
- We had over 53 people visit our site
- We started setting up at 7am Saturday and completed the breakdown at 3.30pm Sunday
- We experienced a brief thunderstorm Saturday
- All radio operations occured in our AC FPL construction trailer
- The national traffic messages were sent on a VHF go kit Kenwood TR-71A dual band radio on battery power outside the ham shack
- The final results will be sent to ARRL (CLICK HERE FMI) in the next 30 days
- We have over 126 active members in our organization
- We ironed out our technical requirements the weekend before the event (16-JUNE)
- This year we had minimal technical issue develop and those were quickly resolved
- We used over 400 pounds of ice for drinks and food
When we get the detail FD2018 results, these will be posted for your review.
73 de N1QFH John.C – FD2018 Coordinator
