It's Field Day Weekend '26 - Remember your BIC

As I write, it's Saturday evening the 27th, both EDT and UTC. It's the last weekend in June and that marks the weekend of the year when American ham radio operators conduct the biggest operating event of the year that isn't a contest: Field Day. Strictly speaking, Field Day (or FD) is an event organized by the American Radio Relay League, or ARRL, so people who are opposed to the ARRL for whatever reason look down on the event. Saying it's not a contest is one of those things that's technically true, by definition, but people submit scores and their logs for bragging rights. FD runs from 1800 hours UTC on Saturday (2PM EDT) to 2059 Sunday ( 4:59:59 PM EDT). 

But that's not why I'm here. I've written about Field Day before, and this previous paragraph is almost word for word from last year's post.  The only edit I remember is changing the date in first sentence from last year's June 28th and I wrote that one in the afternoon. 

The main point of this post is something I haven't written about before. I've mentioned being a paper chaser, with several pieces of wallpaper earned and others that I'm actively working on today - 6m DXCC and the FFMA. As I said before, one of the first few posts (post #6) on the blog was about what I called my Lifetime Achievement Award in Ham Radio, 5BDXCC, short for Five Band DXCC (5BDXCC), and now that stands at 8BDXCC. I'm closing in on my ninth band, 6m  (50-54 MHz). I've told myself that my chances of achieving the FFMA approach zero simply because of the geography. The FFMA is an award for contacting all 488 of the Maidenhead Grid Squares, (1 degree in latitude by 2 degrees in longitude) in the lower 48 states. I'm far closer to the geographic SE corner of the CONUS than the center. Only one station in Florida has earned the FFMA, and that was someone in the NW-most corner of Florida, around 500 miles from me. 

So how does one work toward this? And what's this BIC I mention? 

I'm not going to insist this is the only way to get there, but the First Law for working countries, states or grid squares you've never worked before is simple.  Listen first. Listen, listen, listen and then listen some more. There are other sources of information. The easy one is something I've mentioned dozens of times, websites that allow hams to report hearing other stations, and present a graphical display like this one from DXMaps. 

It's important to point out how you should use something like this, because I've sat in the station many times with a red blob of reported contacts like that and heard almost nothing. The important thing about this is that every line on it has two ends on it, it's either a contact between the two calls, or one end of it is being reported by their computer on its own because the computer can do that on its own. 

Your best chance of knowing you'll hear someone is if someone near you is either reporting working or hearing the call on the other end of the red line. If you see a call that's near you on the map and they have a better station than you do (they can hear weaker signals than you), you may not hear the same station they do. Look at Florida on this plot an you'll see several red lines going toward the NE, perhaps New York, or Pennsylvania, maybe even New England. You'll also see a smaller couple of red lines headed more northwest into the middle of the blob. Someone in that part of the country might be heard as well. 

None of those red lines going east to west across the middle of the country mean anything to us down here in Florida.

This is where BIC comes in, which is an acronym for Butt In Chair. Sit in the chair and listen. If you're using one of the digital modes implemented in software that displays every call it's demodulating, read that like it's the most important contract you've ever gotten.  

One of the things about 6m that's striking is openings can be really specific. Over the years, I've seen times when I'll get a cross county opening to one grid square; sometimes for one 15 second transmission ( common in FT8) sometimes for a few minutes, then it jumps to another grid square, or disappears for some time, then appears again to a different square.

Let me show you a real example. I modified a map of the US showing all the grid squares to show where my central Florida signal popped into the Pacific NW. 

The red lines are supposed to be showing the first square I contacted was CN84 in Oregon and worked a station there. A few minutes later, it went silent, and then I heard CN86 and worked another station. Again, it went silent after a few minutes, and then opened to CN85, where I heard and worked the third station of that day. The details like "how long was it open? then how long did it close?" and more are long gone, but I think the whole thing lasted around 30 minutes. I've since heard similar things with closer grids, enough for me to think that it's actually not a rare thing.

If I wasn't BIC, I wouldn't have heard any of that. Similarly today, there were two guys in two different grid squares that I've never worked yet, DM86 and 96. If it weren't for monitoring closely I wouldn't have gotten both of them. BIC, watching the signals being copied out of my computer on my desktop instead of reports from places like DXMaps. 

Knowing where and when to transmit is another "listen, listen, listen" thing and it varies with the mode you're operating. On CW and voice, they'll generally tell you something like, "listening up 5" or "up 10 to 15". The important part is not to transmit when they're transmitting, but when they're listening. Saying "up 5" or that sort of thing doesn't happen on the new digital modes because those modes don't give enough bits of information. You have to pay attention to when the station is transmitting and choose to not transmit when they are. On WSJT-X's FT-8, which seems to be the most popular mode, I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen someone calling the DX while the DX is transmitting, not listening. 

All DXers have heard this many, many times.