Winter Field Day as WD5EMA, Briarlake Forest Park
Operating under the club callsign WD5EMA with the '2 O' class exchange at Briarlake Forest Park in Decatur — emergency-power operating practice in genuinely frigid, sub-freezing weather that tested both the gear and the operators. Same weekend as the back-to-back January ice storm and bomb-cyclone winter storm — meaning the cold-weather conditions weren't simulated.
What Winter Field Day is
Winter Field Day is the cold-weather counterpart to the ARRL summer Field Day. Same basic format — operate from a temporary off-grid setup, log contacts, exchange class designators — but in late January, when antennas freeze, hand warmers run out faster than they should, and the people, gear, and procedures get tested under conditions that more closely resemble an actual emergency deployment than a sunny June afternoon does.
DeKalb ARES has run a Winter Field Day group activity each year for several seasons running.
Planning — and the late pivot
The 2026 group activity was organized by Cynthia (KR4CJZ), who ran an interest survey through Groups.io in early December asking members to choose between:
- A daytime-only activity at a local park, or
- A daytime + overnight camping multi-day activity at Stone Mountain Campground
Members initially picked the multi-day Stone Mountain Campground option — a more ambitious deployment plan that would exercise the full overnight cycle the way an actual extended emergency operation would. Some members brainstormed on the side about adding a satellite station to the rack for the bonus points Winter Field Day awards for satellite contacts.
Then the weather forecast for that weekend turned. The same incoming winter storm that DKARES would activate a net for the evening of Jan 24 (see ice-storm net activation) made overnight camping at Stone Mountain a poor risk. The plan was pivoted to a daytime-only operation at Briarlake Forest Park in Decatur — same WFD participation, same gear plan, but compressed into a single-day window before the storm’s worst effects rolled in. A real-world example of the planning flexibility that emergency-comms exercises are meant to build.
How it ran
WD5EMA operated under the Class 2 O exchange — 2 transmitters, Outdoor (operating from a temporary outdoor site, no grid power). The site at Briarlake Forest Park ran HF and VHF, with operators rotating through. Contacts were logged for the standard Winter Field Day exchange.
The conditions were the headline: it was genuinely frigid, with sub-freezing temperatures throughout the operating window. This was the same weekend that started the January ice-storm / bomb-cyclone weather pattern — see the January 24 ice-storm net activation the same evening and the January 30 bomb-cyclone net activation six days later. The cold-weather emergency-comms practice that Winter Field Day exists to simulate was, that weekend, not really simulated.
A useful gear recipe that came out of the day
Scott’s Groups.io follow-up thread the next day captured a working chain several members worked through together at the event:
Baofeng UV82 → Digirig audio interface → Soundmodem virtual TNC → PinPointAPRS
— a recipe for putting an HT-class radio on the air for APRS at minimum cost. (Scott was offsite that weekend but picked up the recipe from members who tried it.)
Photos
Multiple members brought cameras. Elliott (KJ4CQJ) created a photo album on the DKARES Groups.io for members to upload their shots, and Alex (KR4BRL) shared his own album externally. Mike Boatright (KO4WX) took a set of professional portraits of the operators on site — visible on his portfolio at michaelboatright.com.
Member-only Groups.io discussion archive: search Winter Field Day on the DKARES list (login required).