I left the house at about 7:40am and headed to the Topaz Casino for breakfast. I headed south on highway 395 past the connection to highway 108 and turned up into the hills. I'm winding my way up a dirt road to an eventual elevation of 9163 feet. This picture was taken about half way in looking west at the Sierra's. The contest starts at 11am on Saturday and I'm allowed no more than 24 hours to setup my station. So my goal was to reach my mountain perch by no later than 11am Friday.
My plan was to use Dave's compound bow to launch fishing line over the top of two trees. My dad was the archer in 2001 and all the other Field Day's before that. Not having any such skills myself, I had Dave give me a 10 minute lesson before he had to leave for Los Angeles. Using that fishing line, I planned to pull up heavier string and with that my three antennas. The image above is the general concept for my first antenna. It is a vertical radiator that is 64% of a wavelength on the operating frequency. By pulling more or less wire up the tree, I could change bands from 10 Meters, through 80 Meters. The spokes represent an elevated wire counterpoise and the purple doughnut where they meet is where my coax fed the antenna.

This style of antenna generates a doughnut like pattern that radiates 360 degrees around the vertical wire. These 3D images were generated when I worked on the antenna designs with my design software. The computer modeled the antenna with 16 Radials; however, I only deployed 4 radials per band. Since I planned to try it on all 5 bands, there were 20 radials of various lengths running out in all directions.
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