Support the event
Free to attend is not free to run
Nobody involved in Seattle Radio Field Day is paid, and nobody attending is charged. The gap between those two facts is closed by donations, by clubs digging into their own budgets, and by people lending gear they could just as easily have left at home.
What a donation actually pays for
This is a small operation with a very specific shopping list. There is no overhead to speak of and no salaries at all.
- Food — Saturday dinner and Sunday breakfast for well over a hundred people, plus coffee running all night. This is the single largest cost.
- Fuel and power — generators, propane for the grills, and batteries.
- Site costs — venue fees, portable toilets, and insurance.
- Consumables — coax, rope, connectors, guy line, flagging tape, and the specific fasteners that always go missing.
- Outreach — printed site maps, signage, and materials for the education and learning tents.
Any surplus rolls into next year, usually into equipment that gets used for a decade.
Money is not the only thing that helps
Sponsor the weekend
Local businesses can sponsor a meal, a tent, or the event as a whole. Sponsors are credited on site, on this website, and in the printed materials. If you sell radios, coffee, hardware, or anything a hundred technical people might want, this is an unusually well-targeted audience.
Lend equipment
Generators, canopies, folding tables, coax, a mast, a large coffee urn, a pickup truck for a couple of hours on Friday. Everything is inventoried, labelled, looked after, and returned. Tell us what you have and we will tell you whether it would help.
Give a couple of hours
Honestly, the thing we run shortest on is not money — it is people on Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. If you are choosing between a donation and a teardown shift, take the shift.
Merchandise
Now that Seattle Radio Field Day has a single identity rather than four competing ones, we can finally put it on things. Shirts, patches, stickers, and mugs are in the works for 2027 — some free for volunteers and operators, the rest sold at cost-plus to feed straight back into the event.
If you would like to be told when it exists, the mailing list is the place.