Members of the Ojai Valley Amateur Radio Club (OVARC) decided to participate in the 2025 ARRL Field Day. We decided to use the club Go-Box and set it up at John’s house. We used his G5RV antenna. As John was checking out the Icom 7300 he noticed there was an intermittent problem with the antenna connection. He checked the coax cable and the feed through on the Go-Box and both checked good. He hooked the antenna back up and still had the same problem. He then decided to use another feed through on the Go-Box and this seemed to correct the problem. However, when he was working on something behind the Go-Box I noticed the signals on the 7300 would disappear when he moved the cables on back of the box. We moved around the coax cable and found it had something wrong with the connector. I retrieved my coax connector crimper from the car and we proceeded to replace the connector. We used the coax prep tool that came with the kit but had trouble getting the cutting blades to properly cut the coax. After going through about a foot of coax we decided to give up on the prep tool and go back to the old method using a knife and dikes to prep the coax. We then crimped the connector and soldered the center connector. The cable was connected the Go-Box and worked great for the rest of the Field Day.
We were going to try to make some FT-8 Digital contacts and attempted to connect a USB cable to the back of the 7300, but found out there was not enough room to connect the cable. Field testing your Go-Box usually turns up minor problems you may not catch otherwise. We will have to see if we can get a right-angle USB connector to fit, or rearrange some items in the Go-Box to make room for the connector.
The following club members were present at different times throughout the event. John, Jesse, William, and George. John made most of the contacts, he said he could have made more contacts but he needed some sleep.
The majority of the contacts were made using SSB and some were made using CW. We operated as 1ESB (single operator, emergency power, Santa Barbara Section). A break out of the contacts are presented below:
41 contacts on 20 meters
23 contacts on 40 meters
1 contact on 10 meters
The fowling states were logged: PA, VT, NH, RI, NJ, WVA, MASS, OH, IA, IN, MN, WI, UT, AZ, TX, NE, BC, SK, AL, CA (7 of 9 Sections).
We logged a total of 37 ARRL Sections
A fun event, but could have been better if we had more participation from the local Hams. We will have to work on getting better participation during the 2026 ARRL Field Day.
John working 20 Meter on the Icom 730
John mentoring William on the Icom 7300