The Test That Became a Tradition

THE HISTORY OF ARRL FIELD DAY

You think you know this story. Not yet.

Every June, more than thirty thousand people drag generators into parks, throw wire over tree branches and set up radio stations out of thin air. They call it Field Day. Most of them will tell you it started as an emergency preparedness exercise.

They’re wrong.

It started as a question. And the guy who asked it had already answered it once before, in North Africa, with a Legion of Merit pinned to his uniform.

But we’ll get to that.

The Man  1919 — 1932

Francis Edward Handy got his first amateur radio license in 1919. His callsign was 1BDI. Commercial radio broadcasting didn’t even exist yet. KDKA wouldn’t go on the air for another year. Ed Handy was talking into the void before there was anything to listen to.

He earned a degree in 1924 and went to work in the Westinghouse labs in Pittsburgh. The same Westinghouse that owned KDKA. The same labs where engineers were figuring out what radio could become. Ed was inside the machine, watching the future take shape.

He didn’t stay long.

In 1925, the ARRL’s Traffic Manager, Fred Schnell, shipped out on a Navy short-wave cruise. Somebody needed to fill the gap at headquarters in Hartford. Ed Handy stepped in as Acting Traffic Manager. By January 1926, they gave him the permanent title of Communications Manager.

That same year, he wrote a book. Practically single-handed, according to the League. One guy, 176 pages. He called it The Radio Amateur’s Handbook. QST later nicknamed it “Handy’s Handy Handbook.” Today it’s in its 101st edition. It’s been the bible of amateur radio for a century, and one guy wrote the first draft.

People started calling him “Mr. Amateur Radio.” They weren’t joking.

Everybody called him Ed.

The Question  1933

By 1933, the country was falling apart. Banks were closing. A quarter of the workforce had no job. Amateur radio was this scrappy little hobby practiced by people who built their own equipment from whatever they could scavenge because nobody could afford to buy anything.

Ed looked at that world and asked a question nobody had thought to ask out loud: If something goes wrong and the phones go dead and the telegraph stops working, can these guys actually set up a station in the middle of a field and talk to somebody?

He didn’t know. So he designed a test.

The June 1933 issue of QST laid it out. Second Saturday in June. Twenty-seven hours. Go into the field and set up a portable station. Ed called it “International Field Day” and he was blunt about what it was. His exact words: “The real object of this contest is to test portables wherever they may be available.”

Notice that word. Contest. He called it a contest. The ARRL today will tell you Field Day is an “operating event, not a contest.” They’ve been arguing with their own founder for ninety-three years.

Ed set up a scoring system. One point for contacts with fixed stations. Two points for other portables. Three for DX. Multiply by the number of ARRL sections plus countries worked. Then he added six words that still echo: “If successful, we want to make it an annual affair.”

If successful. The man had no idea.

That same month, June 1933, Ed also founded the A-1 Operator Club, a recognition program for hams who demonstrated excellence in operating technique. Two programs in one month, both still running over ninety years later. One tested your gear in the field. The other tested the person behind it.

The First Field Day  June 1933

About fifty stations showed up on June 10th and 11th, 1933. The equipment was brutal. Tube rigs that weighed as much as a small child. Batteries the size of suitcases. Antennas made from whatever wire you could find at the hardware store, if the hardware store was still open.

The winner was W4PAW, operating from Indian Rocks Beach, Florida. Six operators working continuously for twenty-seven hours. Sixty-two contacts. Twenty-eight sections. Total score: 1,876 points.

Sixty-two contacts. A competitive Field Day station today knocks that out before the ice melts in the cooler. But in 1933, with gear you could barely carry and propagation you had to take on faith? That was a triumph.

Ed got his answer. People showed up. The gear worked. And by 1934, he’d sharpened the pitch. This wasn’t just about testing portables anymore. It was, in his words, “a test of the emergency availability of portable stations and equipment.”

You see what he did. He took a contest and gave it a mission.

Momentum  1934 — 1941

Field Day got bigger every year. By 1936, it was so popular the ARRL ran two of them. One in June, another in August. The highest QSO total that June was 143. August topped out at 136. Three years in, participation had exploded and the winning scores had more than doubled.

The rules kept evolving. In 1937, the FD message bonus appeared and the winning station hit 204 QSOs. In 1939, the ARRL added the first portability requirement: all station apparatus had to fit inside a 100-foot radius, antennas excluded.

That rule existed for one reason. People were cheating. They’d set up in their backyard with an extension cord running to the house and call it “field” operations. The 100-foot circle was the ARRL’s way of saying: if you can reach your kitchen from your operating position, you’re not in the field.

By 1940, the circle expanded to 500 feet and home stations were invited to work the portable guys. In 1941, something happened that nobody planned. The ARRL notified the FCC of the Field Day operating period. The FCC issued Communication 73-D, which referenced a single start time: 4 PM EST. Just like that, the FCC accidentally created a nationwide simultaneous start. Before 1941, stations had started at 4 PM local time. Now everybody fired up at once.

Then Pearl Harbor.

The War, the Silence and the Colonel  1941 — 1945

December 8th, 1941. The FCC ordered every amateur station in America off the air. Pull your antennas. Seal your equipment. Done.

No Field Day in 1942. None in 1943, 1944 or 1945. Four years of silence. The longest gap in Field Day history, before or since.

Here’s where it gets personal.

In June 1941, the ARRL Board granted Ed Handy a leave of absence for Navy service. By 1942, he’d transferred to the Directorate of Communications at Headquarters, Army Air Forces, in Washington. The man who created Field Day to test whether hams could operate under field conditions was about to find out what field conditions actually looked like.

Ed served across the United States, in North Africa and in the European Theater. He didn’t sit behind a desk the entire time. He was in it. When the war ended, Colonel Francis Edward Handy came home with the Legion of Merit.

Think about that for a second.

The guy who stood in Hartford in 1933 and asked “can hams set up a portable station in a field” spent the next decade watching that question get answered in the deserts of North Africa and across the hedgerows of Europe. The skills his event had been training for eight years turned out to be exactly what the military needed. Setting up portable stations. Operating on emergency power. Establishing communications from nothing. Field Day wasn’t a game. It was a job description.

John Huntoon held down the Communications Manager chair at headquarters while Ed was gone. In mid-October 1945, QST announced that Handy had returned to headquarters. The war was over. The bands were reopening. And Ed Handy, now a Colonel, knew something he hadn’t known in 1933.

Field Day wasn’t just a good idea. It was a necessity.

The Return and the Growth  1946 — 2003

When Field Day came back in 1946, the people who showed up were different. These weren’t hobbyists practicing for emergencies that might never come. These were veterans who’d lived the emergency. They knew what “field conditions” meant because they’d slept in them.

Ed was there too. A 1946 QSL card shows him operating from the Talcott Mountains in Avon, Connecticut during the 10th ARRL Field Day, working alongside W1AOK, W1JMY, W1JTD, W1UE and W1AFB. The founder was still in the field. Still proving the concept. Still throwing wire over tree branches.

VHF got its own category that first year back. By 1948, eleven meters, which would later become the CB band, was added as a Field Day frequency. Battery and emergency power categories appeared. Mobile stations showed up in 1949. By 1950, the modern class structure was taking shape and the circle expanded to 1,000 feet. In 1951, QST profiled Ed as the new Vice President of the ARRL, noting his 26 years of service.

By 1957, the ten-thousandth ham participated in a single Field Day. One event. Ten thousand people hauling radios into fields across an entire continent.

The rules kept experimenting. In 1968, the ARRL made setup mandatory within the 27-hour operating window. The community hated it. By 1969, the rule was reversed. In 1974, a 100-point bonus appeared for making contacts solely by natural power. It disappeared in 1977, then came back in 1980. Satellite contacts got a 50-point bonus starting in 1973. The CW multiplier went to 2x in 1975 as SSB exploded in popularity and became permanent in 1977.

In 1976, W1VV/1 broke the 10,000 QSO mark for the first time. Five years later, the Yankee Clipper Contest Club logged 11,201. The arms race was on.

Then came the GOTA station in 1999. Get On The Air. The idea was simple enough to be brilliant. Put a fully capable HF station under the supervision of a licensed operator and let newcomers sit down and make their first contact. Kids. Neighbors who wandered over to see what the antennas were about. Brand-new Technicians who’d just passed their exam. Five bonus points per QSO. But the real score was the look on somebody’s face when a voice came back from eight hundred miles away.

In 2003, Class F was added for Emergency Operations Centers, tightening the link between Field Day and the agencies that depend on amateur radio when everything else fails.

The Pandemic and the Proof  2020 — Present

Field Day has survived everything. The Great Depression. World War II. The CB explosion. The internet. The death of the Morse code requirement. And then 2020 happened.

A global pandemic made it illegal for clubs to gather in a park.

For the first time since 1945, hams couldn’t do Field Day the way they’d always done it. So the ARRL did something it almost never does. It changed the rules on the fly. Class D home stations, which normally could only work portable stations, were suddenly allowed to work each other. Clubs could submit aggregate scores from members operating from their own shacks.

It was Field Day from your kitchen table. Over thirty-six thousand people still showed up.

They kept the modified rules through 2021. When clubs came roaring back to the parks in 2022, they brought every lesson they’d learned about adapting. The rules bent. The spirit didn’t.

Ed Handy became a Silent Key in 1981. He never saw the pandemic pivot. But the Colonel who’d operated field communications in North Africa would have understood it perfectly. You adapt. You improvise. You get the message through.

The Proof of Concept

And that’s the thread that runs all the way back to 1933. Ed Handy didn’t just create a contest. He created a proof of concept. Proof that ordinary people with homemade equipment could set up communications out of nothing and reach across a continent.

During Hurricane Katrina, over a thousand amateur radio volunteers deployed across the Gulf Coast. Congressional hearings later highlighted the amateur radio response as one of the few things that went right in the entire relief effort. Where did those volunteers learn to throw up an antenna in a parking lot and get on the air in twenty minutes? Where did they practice running a station off a generator for twenty-four straight hours?

Field Day. That’s where.

This year, Field Day is June 27th and 28th. The 2026 theme is “Amateur Radio: A National Resource,” tied to America250, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Ninety-three years after a Westinghouse lab engineer walked into ARRL headquarters and asked whether anybody would show up to test their portables in a field, more than thirty thousand people still answer yes.

Every single June.

The Signal Report

I’ve done more Field Days than I can count. The details blur together after a while. Generators that wouldn’t start. Antennas that came down in the rain. The year somebody forgot the coax adapters and we spent forty minutes in a parking lot trying to make a PL-259 out of optimism and electrical tape.

But the one thing I remember from every single one is the kid. There’s always a kid. Somebody’s son or daughter or grandkid, twelve years old, never touched a radio before. And somebody hands them a microphone and says go ahead, call CQ. And they do. And a voice comes back from three states away. And that kid’s face changes.

That’s Field Day. Not the scores. Not the sections. Not the bragging rights. It’s the moment somebody realizes this thing actually works. That you can build a station out of nothing in a public park and talk to someone you’ve never met a thousand miles away.

Ed Handy figured that out in 1933. We’re still proving it every June.

I’m Lee, N2LEE. 73.

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HF Signal Intelligence

Conditions as of May 29, 2026 15:00 UTC  |  Source: NOAA SWPC via Ham Stats

Band-by-Band Conditions

DX Paths from East Coast

DXpedition Alerts — June 2026

Weekend Forecast

No geomagnetic storms in the forecast. SFI holding in the mid-140s with a dead-quiet K-index means this is one of the better weekends we’ve had in weeks. 20m is the workhorse, open nearly around the clock. 15m and 17m are solid during daylight. 40m and 80m come alive after dark. Great conditions heading into Field Day weekend. Get on the air.

Coming Up in the Pipeline

Next week on The Wayback Dispatch: A kid from South Boston lost his father at age three, dropped out of West Point to marry his wife and built a company that won World War II. The Hallicrafters story, Part 1.

References

QST Magazine, June 1933 — Original Field Day announcement
QST Magazine, June 1941 — Board grants Handy leave for military service
QST Magazine, November 1945 — Handy’s return to headquarters
QST Magazine, July 1951 — “Handy New Vice-President” profile
QST Magazine, December 1999 — “Field Day Through the Years”
ARRL Field Day History — olyham.net/fdhist.htm
ARRL Official Field Day — arrl.org/field-day
ARRL: 2024 Field Day Results
ARRL: Temporary Rule Waivers for 2020 ARRL Field Day

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73 de N2LEE