Each year which members of UNDR Group participate somewhere for the annual Winter Field Day event,  we always try to do something different than the year prior.

In the true spirit of Winter Field Day, having a mindset for emergency preparations centered around off-grid global communications means we need to be out of our natural comfort zones.   Setting up a short term wireless communications outpost somewhere, anywhere away from home is the primary objective. But, having fun while also reaching other objectives for the event really helps create a unique winter activity.

The 2nd Annual Great Hudson Valley Hidden Transmitter Hunt has come and gone, so its time to share a few stories how the event went this year regarding radio direction finding also known as RDF or "fox hunting"

Story #1 - Attendance

Saturday November 9th 2024, the weekend of Veterans Day seems to be working well and this year we again had three different geographic search areas spread across the region.  Kingston, Poughkeepsie and Wappingers were the areas chosen based on a survey.  People tend to be lazy when it comes to travel in our area, so there is no better way to get participation then bringing an event as close to them as possible.

​We had 12 attendees of 16 who took the pre event interest survey.  75% conversion rate is a success!!  Below in GREEN are where the RDF search areas were located. BLUE is where those who attended traveled from and RED is who surveyed but were not able to make attend the event.  The number in each grid is for total number of people surveyed who live in that grid.  Each grid is 4x6 miles in dimension to give sense of scale to below map if you do not live in the area to see how far people did travel.

Story #2 - Popularity

For each search area location, a common starting point was arranged for each area given the expected mix of new and experienced participants for this event.  This also helped gauge how to pair people up and how many hidden transmitters to hide based on where people were planning to be.  The survey results matched pretty well with where people actually ended up searching and further data shows that most people stayed on the side of the Hudson they live on, which was not surprising at all.

Story #3 - Equipment

Since this event was publicized far in advance and a few different mini events focused on educating about radio direction finding plus a few antenna build days took place beforehand,  this was the first event I remember where almost all participants had proper equipment and knew how to use it all.  This was a major success and many were new to this type of event.  Five of the total twelve never participated in such an event before.

This year, the inexpensive TID and Quansheng radios proved popular again and those that had modified radios with new firmware also seemed to do much better than those that did not. 

Only two participants had Kenwood and Yaesu radios and both seemed able to find transmitters more quickly due to better engineering that handles strong signals. However,  the low cost radios continue to get better and its worth everyone looking into the TID Radio H3 or Quansheng UV-K5 if you have not already. 

A range of antenna were used to find the transmitters with all but one being home made design. Using all set to horizontal polarity was the best way to reduce signals and find the transmitters and most everyone used additional attenuation devices. Here is a survey of what was most popular.
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• Radio with SMA regular connector = 43.8%
• Radio with SMA-J connector (Baofeng, TID, etc) = 87.5%
• Radio with BNC connector = 12.5%
• 2m VHF Antenna = 50%
• 70cm UHF Antenna = 68.8% 
• VHF/UHF mobile radio & antenna = 18.8%
• Other advanced equipment (SA, Kraken, TDOA, etc) = 18.8%

Story #4 - Not getting lost and not losing equipment

It is important to be safe and this was a safe event. One hunter did venture onto private property but was able to explain what they were doing and nothing bad happened. At a different site, some additional "sports memorabilia" was found and distributed to those who may have a use for it.

Permission for the more public sites thanks to local police and town workers were obtained to help cut down on potentially lost transmitters or to explain people roaming around with funny antennae. Here are some photos of just the hidden foxes at a few sites.

The actual locations where the transmitters were hidden is only known to those who participated, but a basic map is in the photo scroll below for anyone interested.

As it stands today, July 30th 2024, there have been a total of 4,316 entries received for ARRL Field Day 2024.  The annual event took place on June 22nd and 23rd.  According to data from 2010 to including 2022, there have been 47,717 entries in that time period with the average year seeing 3,670 if the data is right. So by all accounts, it sounds like the COVID influence of Field Day is coming to an end! 

This was the first official year that Ulster & Northern Dutchess Readiness Group participated in Field Day and we put our new club callsign of N2RDY to good use.  This event was also the first time that this callsign has been used on the air since we inherited it from whoever had it last, but last year we borrowed the HVDN callsign of N2HVD.

Our group wanted to be 100% off grid and to truly put the "field" in "field day". While this may not be possible for some people given the hobby is trending older, given we planned to operate low power with our younger core group of people, we pretty much knew that if we could hear a station on the air, we should have no problem making contact with them even at the 5 watts we were limited to as a battery powered class A participant in the event in 2024.

The challenge of operating low power or "QRP" in this event means you need efficient antennae which send your signals where they are best received.  This year we chose two different antenna for the event to maximize our success using the 80m, 40m, 20m, 15m and 10m bands from Saturday 2:00 PM local time until about Sunday 7:00 AM local time.  While this is a 24 hour event and we could have easily stayed at the Vernooy Kill State Forest the whole time, we wanted an extra challenge of adding a fast breakdown and redeploying at another site on Sunday to join our friends at QSY Society located an hour away at Holmes Camp & Retreat across the river back in Dutchess County where K2QS was the callsign in use.

​During COVID, participation changed with this event where rules were adjusted to allow those operating at home to combine results with a club those people belonged to.  There was also a remarkable increase of at home stations known as "Delta" class for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Prior to COVID, these "D Class" stations averaged around 2,730 per year but now over the past few years it has increased to an average exceeding 6,802 with 2020 having a whopping 5,928. 

Our hope in doing something off grid and remote would attract more people back to a real field day. We were right.  With a total of 16 total visitors including our core team of 5, we did pretty well. For comparison, at a more central location the QSY Society had a total of 24 people and the Overlook Mountain Radio Club about the same.  This shows that if its clear something unique will be done, people will travel far. In our case, visitors from Long Island, Northern New Jersey and Connecticut made the trek in addition to those coming close from Ulster and Dutchess County.    The Overlook Mountain Amateur Radio Club also had some travelers visit them at Ferncliff Forest from as far away as Baltimore while they were in the area.  Most everyone at QSY Society was probably all within a thirty minute drive for some local comparisons.

We chose to not make use of any early setup rules on Friday ahead of the event, so we arrived at Vernooy Kill State Forest around 10:00 AM Saturday and deployed the camp.  Operating positions got set up quickly and only one antenna mast seemed to take more time than should have been needed while securing it to a nearby trail post kiosk. Everything else went together smoothly and Shane KD2YRB was first to make on the air contact at 2:07 PM on 20m and quickly followed by Brad KC2VVJ on 10m.  Due to visitor impacts,  we did not get the 15m and 40m stations focused yet until after dinner time Saturday when there was less commotion around our base of operations. 

Temperatures Saturday exceeded 95F with 70% humidity so priorities were getting set up quickly and safely. We also had to ensure there were no snakes looking for new vacation spots in our pop up ham radio village.

We had a great time and are looking forward to this event again come summer time in 2025.  Location is yet to be determined but likely will be in Dutchess County.