W0ILO Field Day 2025
ARRL Field Day 2025 is now in the history books. The Red River Radio Amateurs once again activated W0ILO as class 3A from the Cass County Highway Department in West Fargo, N.D.
We had 22 folks on our sign-in sheet at the end of the event, including some who were visiting us for the first time to see what ham radio was all about.
A big thank you to Chuck, KE0MW, for doing a great job with our media outreach during the event.
We had several folks come out to visit after seeing the article in the Forum. We also had a few new hams who had gotten their licenses but hadn’t made their first QSOs yet. It was wonderful to see them get their first contacts.
The bands seemed to be in pretty good shape, and I saw the SSB stations routinely making contacts. I stuck to the digital and CW station, which also did fairly well, although I had to fight with some time sync issues on the FT8 computer. I will be cooking up a GPS-enabled Raspberry Pi for a time sync server next year.
Late in the afternoon, we were visited by our Dakota Division assistant section managers, Nancy, K0YL, and Rich, W0TF. Thank you so much for making the trip. Nancy and Rich shared some photos of funnel clouds they saw earlier in the day.
And speaking of weather, that was our other visitor for the early evening. While it did not impact us directly, the winds from the outflow boundary prompted us to lower the two antennas we had up: a 40-meter dipole and a 4-element multi-band beam. The dipole was held up by a boom lift that Chuck provided for us—thanks! We had that antenna down in seconds. The beam took a bit more work but was lowered within a few minutes. While the antennas were down, I dropped the power to 5 watts and worked some stations on CW. A second storm followed the first about an hour later, which did hit us. Anton, KC0PFS, and I rode out the storm in the trailer, which fortunately was just heavy rain.
With the storm passed, we got the 40-meter dipole back up as quickly as it was lowered, as well as the beam, and were back on the air. Around 9 p.m., we listened to a pass of RS-44, a linear transponder ham satellite that you can use for FT4, CW, and SSB. I didn’t have a second radio for an uplink, so we just listened to the pass, but it was interesting to hear all the conversations on it.
Our night crew, Tim, K0CRF, started getting going around 11 p.m. on 20-meter SSB. The band seemed to stay viable well past midnight. I took a nap in the passenger seat of my car and woke up around 3 a.m. because of a passing rain shower. After the rain, I got on 40-meter CW around 3:30 a.m., and it was amazing. The noise on the band was gone, stations were spaced out very nicely, and speeds were on the slower side.
Folks started to show back up around 7 a.m., and we operated until about noon.
Thank you to everyone who helped with setup and teardown, and everyone who worked some radio. I’m afraid to start listing folks and forget to mention someone.
With all that said, here are our numbers from the event.
205 Phone contacts
29 CW contacts
47 Digital
And we had eight different operators (Note: it’s possible there were more, but someone might have operated and forgotten to put their initials and call into the logger).
Thanks, all, for the fun at Field Day 2025. I’m already planning and looking forward to 2026.
73s,
Erica W7WXR