Winter Field Day redux

Michael N3LI

I participated in a Winter Field Day effort from a cabin in a PA state park, using a number of radios. My 6600 was pretty clearly the star of the event. Aside from hearing very well, the radio plays well with other radios, rf-wise. We used a ladder line doublet cut for 80 meters,  an 80-40 trap antenna, and an end fed vertical. The bands were interesting - 20 meters was best described as Meh, 40 meters went long-ish pretty early, and 80 meters was really hopping, even during the day.  I was successfully running frequencies on both 40 and 80 using only 100 Watts. Unsolicited signal reports were very good, with people commenting on the quality of the basic DX compression.
All in all, my first contesting effort with my 6600 shows that it really earns it's chops.

Joe N3HEE

How did you manage interstation interference ?  Bandpass filters, coax stubs, antenna separation ?How did the 6600 perform on adjacent bands ? 

Bill -VA3WTB

Joe, your question reminds me a few years ago I took my 6500 to summer field day. There was a CW antenna 25 feet away from mine. Sometimes the CW station would call CQ so they were banging along pretty hard. A few of the other stations in our group gave up after the CW started up because they couldn't work, so they left their radios and joined me. My radio to my surprise was not effected by the close in CW, Didn't even know the CW was there. Now 3 of those guys now own a Flex lol.

Bill NE1B

Joe,  what microphone/headset did you use?  Did you operate any other modes besides SSB?
I am planning to bring my 6600 on a DXpedition/contest and want to have minimal accessories due to air travel. Glad the 6600 does not need external bandpass filters!

Michael N3LI

We had some passive filters we used on the radios - but noise was a problem - the other stations were an Icom 7100 and a IC 7300. I've heard that the 7100 tends to send out some local RFI. I believe that is true. They interfered more with me than vice versa.  Future efforts will have more station separation as well as stubs for the various bands.  Antennas will be more separated as well

Michael N3LI

I'll add that we did some experiments to see what and where we should improve our setups. That was the beauty of this operation - it was more experimental than trying to win anything. I might do a writeup of future efforts.