I usually don't participate in this contest but I wanted to try several of My antenna's performance. My HF vertical antenna is not working from a very tuff winter of ice, rain and snow load. I've been waiting for warmer weather before braving deep snow to inspect it. This next week might be the week --looks like warm up is on the way.
Winter field day is mostly geared towards mobile, remote and local sourced power stations but just like summer field day it also has a category for home stations which is the category I chose. The antenna's performed as expected with the 10m yagi working the best and luckily there was some activity on 10m . The big dipole and even the inverted L were noisy and neither performed very well. The "L" is cut for 160m and does work on 75m but needs constant matching with any frequency change. My big dipole doesn't tune on 40 and 15 so I typically use this one for 75 and 20m only. I really miss the Butternut HF6V which works well on 40-10 and is the one I use on HF contests along with the 10m yagi . A future project might be putting the old G5RV jr. antenna back up since it covered 40 and 15m okay.
I only had less than 30 contacts with most being on 10m although I did add a few on 20m too. The other bands I listened on but had very little luck getting them to tune up so I gave up on those bands. I hope to have the vertical fixed before several future contests.
73---Tim
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