The ECRT utilized the Illinois QSO Party as an excellent training operation. The goal of the Illinois QSO party is to contact as many other Illinois stations as possilbe utilizing amateur radio means. This gave our team the opportunity to take our City of Peoria Office of Emergency Management Incident Command Trailer. The Incident Command Trailer has been designed to provide multiple modes of communication during an emergency event specifically to cordinate communications of multiple agencies. With this event we wanted to determine if we could provide communications to multiple parts of Illinois, specifically Springfield (State Capital), Chicago, Quad Cities, Peoria, and other major cities.

The Team located a spot on the Logan, Mason and Tazewell County lines to operate from. We graciously received permission from the land owner to set up our equipment for the afternoon and early evening. We located the trailer just off the west side of the roadway in a nearly flat drainage ditch up on a hilltop. From this vantage point we were able to see clearly for miles to all directions. We powered the AC portion of the trailer with a small 5,000 watt Honda generator which also helps keep the DC battery bank fully charged.

For this event we knew we would be shifting between 20, 40 and 80 meter bands. We opted to set up a G5RV antenna out in the freshly harvested corn field. We erected our 50 foot push up pole to ~35 feet with the center point of the antenna attached on a non-conductive out-riging. Each leg of the antenna was stretched to the east and west respectively and attached to our trailer on the east end and a additional elevated pole out in the corn field to the west. For equipment we switched between an Icom 706 and Yaesu FT-100D with the MFJ-949E anteanna tuner which allowed us a maximum of 100 watts output.

We operated ILQP from 1800Z - 0100Z. During the event we made 267 contacts, including stations in 43 Illinois counties, 35 states and provinces and 2 contries (USA and Canada). We contacted all of the counties to meet our goal of connecting with the major cities in Illinois as may be required during a large scale emergent event.

For the 7 hours we operated we also validated we were able to watch local digital media and cook food. The weather was cool with afternoon highs in the low 60's and wind gusting to near 30 mph. The wind made the antenna require some extra anchoring. Pictures and video of us operating, the setup and the trailer can be viewed at the links below.

- Nick KB9YVN's Photos of ILQP