WFD 2023
The Cherokee Amateur Radio Society from Woodstock, Georgia participated in Winter Field Day (WFD) on January 28-29. Like the ARRL Field Day, it runs for a 24-hour duration starting at 2:00 PM Eastern Time (1900 UTC).  The object is also the same: to contact as many other participants as possible in that 24-hour window.

We chose Red Top Mountain as an operating location, as this is a beautiful natural area as well as a POTA park (K-2194). Two activities for one activation. Homebase was a cottage located close to the lake with plenty of trees to hang antennas.

The club operated as class 4O, which means 4 transmitting stations Outdoors. We used end-fed multi-band dipoles deployed as slopers. This worked fairly well, but we did have interference from the one digital station. For modes, we ran two SSB stations, a CW, and a Digital (JS8CALL).

By the WFD rules, we could not use the popular FT4 and FT8 digital modes. Any digital transmission was restricted to modes where an actual message could be passed. We chose to use a newer mode called JS8CALL. Thanks to Bruce, K4OTX, we made 28 contacts, but found that this mode was not being used much by other participants. He did log W1AW/5 with this mode.

Winter Field Day has really come into its own. Though it started back in 2006, the participation was low. In 2022, the WFDA processed over 2,500 logs from stations around the world. They expect 2023 to be even larger.