By Chip Coker KD4C
RWK Field Day was Saturday (June 27) at the Richardson Emergency Operations Center (EOC) (Plano Rd & Lookout Drive).
Setup, operating, and overall Field Day was similar to previous recent RWK field days. Overall a (mostly) successful outing. We had 58 members and guests, which is a more normal number, but still quite a bit down from 75 people in 2024. Hopefully everyone that came out had a good time (please let me know if there was something that you didn’t like, or if there was something about our Field Day that kept you from participating with RWK).
Overall Results for K5RWK At The Richardson EOC
We operated Class 3F (since we were at the Richardson EOC), similar to previous years. We had one station dedicated to CW, one to Digital modes, and one for SSB. Band conditions were worse than last year, which is expected due to having passed solar max last year. We were scared that 10M was going to be unusable but there was a good amount of activity. We also operated the allowed “Free VHF station” which added significantly to the number of contacts.
Overall, 2026 ended up with 378 contacts, which is down slightly from 404 from 2025.
We worked most states and Canadian Provinces (can’t believe that nobody got Alaska?)
We also worked 71 ARRL Sections, not quite a clean sweep.
Jon NN5T proved to (again) be the leader in pounding out CW contacts, followed by Carl W5SU, Dick K5KIP and Larry KI5UXC. 6 Meters was open for the vast majority of the 8 hour period which got us another 69 contacts. A total of 18 operators (at least that tagged themselves in the logging software) were credited.
Other Activities
In addition to actual FD operating, we had:
Foxhunt-palooza – our own KE5GDB placed several micro-foxes hidden in the area (similar to what he did last year). Overall, it looks like a bunch of you wandered around Lookout Park hunting foxes – there are almost 50 finds of the 4 foxes in the foxhunt log.
Balloon Launch – The Balloonatics launched a small High-Altitude Balloon during Field Day, with the usual trackers, a HD camera, and a cross-band repeater. There was a good bit of traffic on the cross-band repeater (the output was on the 446.0 simplex frequency that got a lot of attention) and the images were spectacular as always. The balloon made it up to 97,000 feet and came down and was recovered short of McKinney.
Field Day Pizza and Cleaning Up
It wouldn’t be RWK Field Day without pizza and salad. We had our usual Pizza dinner at 5:30-6pm for everyone that was operating, logging, observing and otherwise helping. It was dangerous to be in the way to the break room! You can tell from the QSO Rate just exactly when the pizza arrived!
We had the traditional “copying of the Field Day bulletin” at 8PM and after that, we started taking down the temporary antennas (the full-wave loops that NN5T built last year, which again performed well) and packing up the radios. Rolling up the coax is always the *highlight* of Field Day (sarcasm intended). Overall, cleanup was fast and efficient, and we left the wonderful facility just as we found it.
Field Day Part 2 – Operating from Home
RWK again took advantage of the post-COVID rules change to allow members to operate from their home stations as part of the overall club operation. Last year this approach served us very well – in 2025 we were 12th nationwide out of 168 clubs, we had the most submissions (21) of all clubs, we were #13 (out of 51) nationwide in Class 3F, and we were the #1 Club Score in all of NTX ARRL Section.
So far in 2026, we’ve got 15 members that have submitted individual logs (and hopefully we will pass last year’s numbers)!
We hope that our aggregated score will again place us at the top of the North Texas section – showing that RWK is the place to be for field day.
See You Next Year
We will be back for Field Day 2027, and we hope that you will join us!
