About
Four clubs, one field, once a year
Seattle Radio Field Day is a collaborative community event hosted by four Seattle-area amateur radio organizations, held as part of ARRL Field Day — the largest annual amateur radio event in the United States.
What Seattle Radio Field Day is
Seattle Radio Field Day is a collaborative community event hosted by four Seattle-area amateur radio organizations: the Puget Sound Repeater Group (PSRG), the West Seattle Amateur Radio Club (WSARC), the Seattle Auxiliary Communications Service (Seattle ACS), and Cascadia Radio.
The event is part of ARRL Field Day, the largest annual amateur radio event in the United States, during which tens of thousands of operators across the country set up temporary field operations and practise communicating under simulated emergency conditions — without relying on commercial power or permanent infrastructure.
At Seattle Radio Field Day, visitors can observe and participate in amateur-radio voice, Morse code (CW), and digital radio operations, learn how temporary communication systems are deployed, attend educational talks and demonstrations, and even make radio contacts under the supervision of experienced radio operators.
Whether you are a seasoned radio enthusiast, interested in emergency communications, or simply curious about amateur radio, Seattle Radio Field Day offers a fun, family-friendly opportunity to discover how amateur radio serves as both a technical hobby and a valuable public resource.
Three reasons, and they are all true at once
It is a serious rehearsal
Seattle sits on a fault line, at the foot of a volcano, in a region that loses power to windstorms most winters. When the grid and the cell network go down together, amateur radio is one of the few systems that still works — but only if the people running it have practised. Field Day is that practice, done properly, once a year, under real conditions.
It is how the hobby grows
Almost nobody discovers amateur radio by reading about it. They discover it because somebody handed them a microphone and a stranger answered. Field Day is the single best recruiting weekend of the year, which is why the GOTA station, the talks, and the Elmers matter as much as the contest score does.
It is genuinely a good weekend
Radio aside: a field, a grill, tents, friends, staying up far too late, and watching the sun come up over an antenna farm. Plenty of people come for the technology and stay for the company. There is no shame in coming for the company first.
Who puts this on
Four independent clubs, each with its own character and its own reasons for being here, running one event together. All four welcome new members, and none of them require you to know anything yet.
Field Day has been running since 1933
ARRL Field Day started in 1933, when a group of operators decided that the interesting question was not whether your station worked at home, but whether you could build one somewhere else, quickly, and make it work anyway. Ninety-odd years later that is still the entire point.
The rules reward exactly the things that matter in an emergency: getting on the air fast, running without mains power, using antennas you put up that morning, and involving people who have never done it before. Points are awarded for having a licensed operator supervise a newcomer making their first contact — which tells you what the event is really about.
In Seattle, the four host clubs each ran their own smaller operations for years before deciding the whole thing would be better as one event. It was. More stations, more visitors, better food, and a great deal more shade.
Questions, press, or an idea
Whether you want to bring a class, write about the event, exhibit something, or just ask what on earth a GOTA station is — we would like to hear from you.