W7TBC · ARRL Field Day ArchiveTwo years of Thunderbird Field Day,
side & side.
Every June, hundreds of clubs around the country take amateur radio out of the shack and into the field. Here's how Arizona's Thunderbird ARC stacked up — nationally, in the AZ section, and mode by mode — over the past two seasons.
From a comfortable QTH to a battery-powered field site
The headline number — final score — dipped slightly between 2024 and 2025. The numbers underneath tell a much bigger story: TBARC shifted from a five-station home setup running on commercial power to a fully portable, battery-powered Class 5A operation at a public field site. The result was a tougher operating environment that nearly doubled the bonus paper trail and locked in an emergency-prep mission alignment two years running.
The biggest shift wasn't the score — it was how we operated
Mode mix tells you what kind of Field Day a club ran. 2024 was digital-heavy thanks to the 6m/10m WSJTX station. 2025 leaned hard into 20m SSB. CW disappeared completely — the single biggest leverage point we've identified for 2026.
The single biggest 2026 ask: a CW operator.
W7TBC ran zero CW QSOs in 2025 — and CW counts double the per-QSO value of phone. A single committed operator running 200–400 QSOs is worth +400 to +800 final-score pointsand would lift TBARC into the AZ top 3 outright. As a Class 5A operation, one of our five transmitters is ready to be a dedicated CW station for the weekend — operator just needs to bring the keying.
You don't need to be a top-tier contester. The math says even 100 CW QSOs over the weekend gets us there. Catered field weekend in Flagstaff · June 26–28 · 2026.
RSVP at fd.w7tbc.org →Plus a half-dozen smaller levers — overnight Sunday digital shift, high-band exploitation Saturday afternoon, spreading the operator load, Site Visitation bonuses — that each add 100–600 points. The full plan and other ways to pitch in live on the 2026 page.
More to explore
Each year page shows the band-by-band breakdown, our AZ section standing, the AZ leaderboard slice around W7TBC, and the full bonus claim sheet with what was confirmed in the artifacts vs. what was newly unlocked that season.
Class 5A on battery, AZ #7, national 5A #22, the only AZ-section 5A entry, and a 1,680-point bonus haul that leads the state.
Class 5D from Jack Lunsford's 5-acre QTH in Flagstaff — one of just 3 clubs nationwide to run the rare home-station 5D configuration. AZ #6 with a balanced CW + Digital + Phone mix.
Ten side-by-side metrics with year-over-year deltas and a one-sentence takeaway on each. The narrative behind the transformation.
June 26–28, 2026. What we're aiming for, what we learned from 2025, and the five levers we're pulling — starting with the call for a CW operator.