Field Day in Basovizza
2026-09-05
A Field Day on the Border: Friendship, Antennas, and Remembering to Enjoy Myself
Last week I travel to Trieste for work and decided to stay one extra day for something purely for fun: a ham radio field day with a small group of friends from the local radio club, right at the edge of Italy near the Slovenian border.
The setup
Field days are European or even global contests, really more of an excuse than a competition in the strictest sense: the idea is to get as many radio contacts, or QSOs, as possible over a set period, log them, and submit the results. But for the handful of us who showed up, near the village of Bazzoviza on a beautiful stretch of coast overlooking the sea, the contest itself was almost beside the point.
I’m part of the committee of the Trieste section of ARI, the Italian amateur radio operators’ association, even though I no longer live there. The section has somewhere around sixty or seventy members on paper, but only a small, dedicated core actually shows up to things like this. We were seven or eight people that morning, which turned out to be exactly the right number to appreciate the effort involved.
Not just a hobby toy
I’m still a relative beginner at this, and it showed. The others arrived like professionals: two diesel generators, each rated around two kilowatts, loud but reliable; proper high-quality coaxial cable; gazebos for shade; folding chairs; and an HF rig with a genuine linear amplifier pushing several hundred watts, nothing like the small QRP portable radios I’m used to thinking of as typical field gear. Raising the antenna, an off-center-fed dipole strung from a fifteen-meter telescopic pole, took real skill: guy wires, ground stakes, the works. I mostly watched and learned.
The contest
We broke for lunch, pizza and pastries that didn’t stand much of a chance in the heat, and an enormous amount of water and Coke just to keep up with the temperature. The contest started in the afternoon, and over the following hours the group logged a few hundred contacts, less than they’d hoped for, partly because band activity was lower than expected, and partly because human-generated radio noise, what we call QRM, crept in partway through the day and degraded the signal. Mild frustration, the kind every contest seems to produce somewhere along the way.
What I took home
I left the next day, so I only had the one full day and evening with them, but it was enough. Beyond the contest numbers, what I took away was the reminder that this elaborate setup wasn’t just about having fun: several of them talked about training for emergency readiness, being able to get a working HF station up quickly in the field in case of a natural disaster or other crisis. That combination of playfulness and genuine purpose was quietly impressive.
Mostly, though, I came away thinking about something less technical. I tend to be very hard on myself, “severo” as we’d say in Italian, always pushing, rarely just enjoying something for its own sake. Watching this small group cultivate their own peace of mind through a technical hobby, indulging themselves a little, enjoying the heat and the company and the imperfect contest results without much complaint, was a quiet lesson. Life is short. Sometimes the antenna doesn’t need to work perfectly for the day to have been worth it.