Activating a park in bad conditions

POTA activating in bad conditions can be challenging… for some modes. Seems that FT8 doesn’t really care if the bands are crappy and will gleefully allow you to play radio anyway.

This was an experiment to see if the sBitx amateur radio could work in terrible space weather like you see below in the report.

The above and below photo show how fast the band conditions changed on me while activating on this day. The band noise could be seen on the display “walking” across the band segment at times. This band noise would pretty much wipe out what you could hear on the band, but the radio could still decode the FT8 signals so I was able to work almost 20 stations in about an hour even with this sort of noise coming into and out of the band.

I normally dont bother activating in bad band conditions, but this day I really wanted to see just how good FT8 was at extracting signals from the noise. I can honestly say that I was impressed by the performance of this mode. Digital modes have their place and this is very much one of those places. Weak signal in poor band conditions shows just how important it is to use all the modes available to the amateur radio operator. I was once a die hard CW only op and to be honest, it is still one of my favorite modes, but of late I have started getting into SSB more and now I am also dipping my toe into digital modes more and more and I am really liking it. Dont limit yourself out of a stigma like I did, you might just like what you find.

Below is a photo of the display that shows something that i had never seen before and that is the pulsing band noise. That was a new one for me. It too would come in waves and these would last much longer it seemed. The sBitx just kept chugging along though, I would sometimes pick calls and sometimes answer calls and this is what makes FT8 awesome. I couldn’t have possibly made SSB contacts in these conditions…

Here you can see the operating position for the day. Perfect blue skies and nice temps makes for a great day on the air at a park. I had to goto this spot as the lower lot was completely full since the weather was so nice, it was fall and a Saturday. Sometimes going to this spot has it’s perks like lower band noise from the campground inverters and such so I dont really mind it.

I had planned on using a battery and setting up on the picnic table I usually occupy down next to the canyon rim, but there just wasn’t anywhere to park and I didn’t want to wait on someone to leave just so I could park.

This radial is on it’s last leg. I have twisted this broken radial back together for months now and on top of that, the connector on the other end has also broken off. This is almost comical as this is the best performing radial in my set! That is why I am reluctant to repair it at this point…lol. It just works and if it ain’t broke (figuratively) then dont fix it.

I dont know when this bug (I think it is a jumping spider) decided to join in on the fun but here he was playing on the antenna mount. By the time I finished the activation, this little guy was long gone. Kinda fun to notice the little things like this when you are out in the park.

By the end of the activation, I had worked 18 unique contacts and garnered one dupe because I didn’t read my logbook very carefully and called one ham two times…then I decided to attempt to work some CW. This was pretty futile though as I only worked one contact out of about 15 minutes of calling as this is abysmal for me when I work CW. I can usually work about one call per minute even when I am running QRP power levels. So when I only work one…that is bad band conditions. The stations would literally just disappear then reappear and it was impossible to get complete calls so I called it quits after one.

All in all, it was still a great day in the field. Hope to work you soon!

WK4DS

Dual radio POTA activation? Sure!

Today I setup both the Ten Tec Argonaut V as well as the sBitx V3. This was because i was not sure if the sBitx V3 would hold up the entire time. You see, it has had an ailing 5 volt regulator for a while and I was planning on replacing it later today, but first… POTA!

So I go to US-2169 and setup in my usual spot and get out both radios so that I can work CW on the Ten Tec if the sBitx flakes out on me. It didn’t, but since I had already gotten it out, I used the Ten Tec Argonaut V anyway and worked what CW I could with it. You see, today was another day that I stayed above 20 meters the entire time. That was the plan from the outset and it was quite successful too. I love using 15 meters in particular since it goes over seas easily for me. I will usually work several DX stations if the band is open and today is no exception. I worked 5 DX stations over an 18 minute span of time, not bad for a 15 watt radio… I worked so much FT8 is short order that I almost didn’t need to setup the CW station at all, but I wanted to work some CW anyway so I just got on the air with it and this is how it went.

The operating position was a little crowded today but not too bad, I used the hard case for the Ten Tec Argonaut V as a table of sorts to sit the radios on so I was able to move them back and out of the way of my writing surface. This left plenty of room for the nanoVNA and my other small items I use when activating a park. I have gotten really comfortable with setting up like this, I can set this up in just minutes and it requires zero use of the park infrastructure (such as trees or picnic tables) over the parking space I would consume either way and some space for my radials.

So in a previous blog post I had mentioned that I was going to use the smith chart on the next outing to show how you get way more information about the antenna under test with it instead of the simple SWR graph and here it is. Contained below is the 15 meter plot from 20.5mhz to 21.5mhz and the marker is resting at the upper limit in the photo. The center line across the chart is purely resistive measurements, anything above this line is inductive and anything below this line is capacitive in nature. As you can see on the display, the line representing the span I am looking at, 20.5 to 21.5mhz, is all above the line showing that my antenna system is inductive in nature so it will have some inductive reactance to the signal. The very center of the chart where the smaller circle intersects the line is 50 ohms - resistive (right below the flag from my measurement). As you can seem the further you move away from this point, the further from 50 ohms you get.if it were to be something like 100 ohms, you would need a 4:1 transformer to correct the impedance mismatch, this is why antennas need transformers. The characteristic impedance of the antenna is not usually 50 ohms which is what the transmitter is designed to see.

In the second photo I have switched the chart over to a simple SWR plot versus frequency and you can see how it is easier to read for the lay-person. It does give you the data you need in the firld really quickly and make it easy to know if your antenna is short or long and if your radials are good to go and such. This is what i use most of the time in the field to just make sure the antenna is presenting a good load to the transmitter.

In the above photo I learned something strange about the sBitx today. The two clocks don’t have to be synchronized to work. FT8 is not time forgiving, your radio time marker has to be fairly accurate (within so many milliseconds or maybe a second or two max) or it wont make connection at all with the other stations. As you can see in the lower photo, FT8 worked perfectly and I made several contacts with this mode so the computer clock must not matter at all… I don’t know what is going on here but it works so I dont question it.

Today saw a bunch of DX early on which always makes my day. But all in all it was a great day for POTA and I was stoked to get 21 calls in the log. Until next time, dust off that key or microphone and see if you can get a park or two into the log.

David

Scout…ing for contacts POTA style

Today saw me field a “new-to-me” radio, a Ten Tec Scout 555.

If you have never seen one of these radios, you are not alone. This is a radio that was produced for only about 15 years, towards the end of the company’s life before it changed hands around 10 years ago. It is unique in that it doesn’t contain every band but rather only one at a time. These little modules each contain the special bits to make it work on each band they are designed for and the goal back in the day way to just get the bands that you use. Turned out that these radios quickly formed a cult following and they all wanted the “whole set” of bands for them. I have the whole set of bands thanks to KG4WBI rounding up an 80 meter module and presenting it to me as an early birthday present. Once I had the whole set, I felt this iconic antique needed a better way to travel around when in my truck so I went to Harbor Freight and grabbed an Apache 4800 hard shell case for it. The Ten Tec Scout fits perfectly alongside the set of band modules. I even created a pocket under the radio to store the power cord so I have the whole rig in the case. (The 20 meter module is currently installed in the radio in the below photo)

Today saw me back in the “truck-shack” (I think this is what I am going to start calling this in the future) and setting the radio up on the hard shell case in the passenger seat. Today’s setup was not for power access though as my internal power cord it only fused to 10 amps and the Scout draws that much on transmit normally since it is not user adjustable on the front panel…yet.

I have found a website about the Scout that is a literal treasure trove of information about this radio, mainly in the CW mode, but a wealth of information none the less. I found the website by watching Coastal Waves and Wires video here. The website is by NA5N and is linked here for quick access… His mods for the Scout are pretty extensive an he does a great job of documenting the mods as well as explaining the process the radio uses to transmit and receive and he even has these hand drawn graphics that are amazing.

Back to the activation after chasing a rabbit for a minute…

So today I started on 40 meters as I figured I could make a good many contacts there on SSB, problem is that I have tuned my ham sticks for the CW portion of the band and the 40 meter ham stick is not very broad banded so it really wasn’t going to allow this. What did I do then? Well, I got on CW and made a few contacts before moving up to 20 meters where the antenna is broad banded enough to cover the entire amateur band space.

A couple of noteworthy items here. The 36Ah battery weighs almost nothing but packs a ton of energy. I use it from time to time to power my POTA ops but most of the time it is backup power in my shack for use during power outages and emergency nets and such.

The key I am using today is the Gemini and is a great little collapsible travel key. I had one little problem with it right after buying it due to the center post working loose but other than that it has been flawless. Great portable CW key if your wondering.

The antenna setup is as follows, hamstick riser, hamstick in QD socket, then several radials to form a counterpoise. I have taken to running one or two LONG radial now to play with how they interact with the hamstick antennas and so far it has been interesting to say the least.I found that on 40 meters, if the long radials were pulled taught, (I “anchor” them with a simple weight so I dont need tent stakes) that the resonant point would be well under 7.000mhz, but if I pulled just enough slack in them that they laid on the ground all the way except the first 8 feet from the antenna. Imagine gently curving down to the ground about 7’ from the yellow antenna riser then laying on the grass the rest of the way out. This moved the resonant center value up into the CW portion of the 40 meter band.

The point here is that the length and position of your radial field is absoloutly critical to your antenna system as a whole. The more I play with these radials, the more I learn about how they interact with the system and how important it is to measure your antenna prior to starting your activation if you build it on site.

In the photo below you can see how the radials were setup for the 20 meter band.

Remember at the beginning of this story where I mentioned “ominous” clouds? Well, here is a photo of them to show you what I meant. That looks like rain to me, I did get by without getting rained on before finishing, but that looks EXACTLY like the kind of clouds that bring rain to my area of operation.

Some thoughts on the logbook from today. I have gotten very comfortable with paper logging in the field and then transcribing at home. I did it today actually and it was fine…for the most part. But there was a couple of times when I needed a helper to log for me when I was working SSB. SSB happens so much faster than CW does for me that I was struggling to keep up with the log.

If you will notice in my other posts, I will number the QSOs and even write out the time on the FT8 QSOs as they are pretty slow to complete for me. But once I moved to 20 meters today and jumped on the air with more than 17 watts, things got sporty! I literally stopped writing line numbers, abbreviated most of the time stamps and even left out some of the states just to keep up! It was madness! I could not believe how much more your signal gets out with that minimal amount of power increase. It was a blessing and a curse at the same time, I now see why people will computer log in the field and have a helper to log for them so they can keep up. I could have easily worked 100 QSOs without trying hard if I had just stayed longer at the park. The SSB portion was on fire! The CW portion was doing fine too, but there were SO many more ops on SSB on this day…so many more… In the end, I had a great time and even worked my buddy Roger KG4WBI, this has to be my closest 20 meter contact for POTA ever. If I measured it right we were 2.9 miles apart. LOL What a great day to be on the air!

73

WK4DS

Getting a quick activation in…

Today I wanted to get the whole activation on just bands above 20 meters. This means a lower QSO count than normal (most likely) and I am good with that. For me it is not about a high QSO count but rather time at the park (so long as I get my ten minimum of course…lol). So let’s get it setup and going. I only had two hours from the time I left the house till I had to be back at the house, so this pointed me straight to US-2169 since it was only a 20 minute drive for me. 40 minutes gone in driving only left me with 80 minutes to setup, activate and breakdown the rig, so I was in a bit of a hurry. I was really hoping that my usual spot would not be taken and fortunately it wasn’t.

Today also saw this little guy, pictured below, die on me. I went to check the SWR on my nanoVNA and it was really bad. It was so bad that it didn’t show the antenna to be connected at all, that is the worst kind of bad… So I start troubleshooting as this is eating my time and I was not wanting to lose anymore time than needed to setup. Well, I got lucky and as soon as I removed this from the circuit, the antenna showed up on the nanoVNA!.I just had to run without my usual common mode current choke in place, it could be worse, I could have a bad radio… Luckily I can easily get these from the internet without much issue. I also have a coax from ABR that has the ferrites on it but forgot about it at that moment or I would have simply ran it instead…

As of late, I seem to be operating from the truck cab more and more. Today was no exception either as it has a power cable hardwired, is in the shade (technically) and is easy to setup. I don’t want to just operate from here though so I am going to make a conscious effort to do things more diversified going forward… But for today, it was inside the truck so I could save time. Good thing I did too, the higher bands were…thin…to say it plainly.

So I start by hopping on 15 meters as the “weather report” looked good for the band today. Trouble is no one else was there from what I could hear. I looked and looked for a CW signal and saw nothing anywhere, I then called CQ for a few minutes to no avail as well. At this point I decided I would switch over to FT8 and get a few DX contacts in the log since this is where I usually do that… didn’t happen. I worked one person in Arizona and that was it! 15 meters was not doing anything today! Wow… what a reality check. I normally get a few, but just one is a new record for me here.

Well, once accepting defeat on 15 meters I begrudgingly moved down to 17 meters and found the band to be alive! So the MUF must have been 18.200mhz as I made a bunch of contacts on 17 meters in pretty short order on CW before switching over to FT8 to finish up the activation.

The park today saw a lot of activity and I actually had to share the parking lot with other people…I felt really odd having to do this. LOL… But really this location in particular is really good as it is in the middle of the lot which happens to be the least traveled location in the whole lot. There really isn’t anything that anyone would need that would require them to walk where I deploy the antenna. This is something that I look for now when activating a park. It is real important that you don’t leave a bad experience behind when you go to a park to activate it. This is one of those simple ways to accomplish this goal without having to spend any money or time on it.

The sBitx has quickly become one of my favorite radios to do this kind of operating with, Ashar has really done some out of the box thinking with this radio and it shows. I can simply make all the memory keyer memories I want, I can even make them for FT8 as well as CW and it is easy to edit, has no character limit, and is easy to find in the computer too. I just love how smart this radio is designed. I love the native FT8 mode, the ease of use in CW and how it is even a simple touch screen on top of all that…for 400$. That is hard to beat in my book.

Today also had a new thing happen to me. Look at the log and notice how I worked KC7AC on 15 meters with FT8 then when I moved to 17 meters I worked KL7AC on CW. At first I thought it was a typo in the log but the CW is unmistakable and the FT8 showed that call, which is almost like getting a jinx when talking to a friend or something. HaHa, I just thought it was kind of neat to see that and figured I would mention it at the end. I hope you get out and make some contacts today!

WK4DS

Broke out the Penntek TR-35 for a change.

When you dont use a radio for a while it is almost like having a new radio…

This radio has quickly became on of my all time favorite radios. This tiny radio has everything you could ask for in a CW machine…EXCEPT for an internal antenna tuner…but I digress. In the past I have had the Elecraft K1 (a couple of times actually) which does have a tuner (both of mine had the tuner) but it was not as intuitive to use. That is why I sold it and got this one instead. It is a better radio in my opinion… Even missing the antenna tuner, I prefer this little radio to the K1, now this comes with some needed caveats as it is not really fair to compare these two radios directly. You see the K1 was design around 20 years ago and the TR-35 my more recently with much more modern technology and features. The stability of the TR-35 is uncanny compared to the K1 which would drift a little till it warmed up. Still the K1 was a wonderful machine for my needs and I used it to activate a POTA park on the island of Hawaii last year, so it is plenty capable.

Due to the weather improving I have moved the “shack” outside and setup on the bed cover to get some sun and fresh air, plus it is easier to work since I can spread out the gear somewhat.

I like these hamstick antennas so much that I am thinking about making a tripod mount for them so that I can setup at a nearby picnic table and use them with an elevated counterpoise concept… I could even get them higher above the grade this way too, possibly improving performance a little.

So this is the whole station today, the hamstick on 17 meters with a 15’ coax to the common mode choke. I put it on the nanoVNA and the resonant point was high, and I think it is from the fact that the 17 meter counterpoise wire have some broken off of them which makes them too short for a tuned circuit. But nonetheless the SWR measurement was plenty good enough to use, so I got on the air in short order. To try to compensate for this, I added the 20 meter radial that works so well for me now in the past on a bunch of bands. (I should probably measure this wire and make a new since it is getting frazzled) but it didn’t help very much today. I left it anyway as it did seem to help a little…

The operating position today… I really like using the bed cover for the operation position as it affords me the most user space I could possible imagine as well as it is simple. I have activated with this battery 3 or 4 times at this point and it is still over 13 volts!

The key for today is the Gemini travel key. This has turned out to be a wonderful little key and I am so happy to have bought it. It works so well.

As you can see from the log, I had a great day on 17 meters and even landed me a DX station! Jan was in the Netherlands when I started hearing his callsign! It was awesome that he could hear me too!!! There was some fading of course, but he could hear me! I made a good bit of notes about the activation in the log today where you can see things happening like when I lost a QSO outright to some one tuning up on top of me…for a long time… There is another note about the time when someone had a messed up car ignition that created some broad band noise and I couldn’t hear anything for a few minutes till they left.

Little Manatee River State Park K-1898

I had some time today and wanted to get out of the city here in Tampa so I went to Little Manatee River State Park and setup a quick little activation on 15 meters.

This park is really nice and well cared for. It has many hiking trails as well as a creek on one side that you can canoe in…just dont pet the alligators and you will be fine there, but they do have an equestrian area as well. Plenty to do if you want to do something other than park activations for some reason…lol

Today saw me setup on the bed cover agian as it was nice out and I was mostly in the shade so I knew I wouldnt get too hot. I ran CW only as I didn’t feel like messing with the sBitx V3 to work FT8 as I really only had about 30 minutes of operating time and for me, the FT8 contacts come in a little slower than the CW contacts. I did choose 15 meters though which was a little bit of a gamble, but it worked out once I got on the air and tuned around the band a little and found it was active, I rested a little easier.

I ran the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 transceiver today with the N3ZN key and Hamgadgets memory keyer. This radio is a joy to use for CW and I really enjoy using it for park activations. It has about 20 watts full output, but today I was only running 15 watts as I normally don’t push the old transistors as hard as when they are new… probably don’t matter, but in my mind it makes sense. When I am operating, I use 3 things, well 4 if you count the AF gain (volume). I use the multi-function knob to control the BW (band width of the filter) and the RIT control. The same knob does both jobs, you just hit which ever button you need first then set that function to what you want. The display is currently showing the BW setting of 600 Hz. I will open it up if the band is quiet, but this thing is pretty selective and will allow me to go down to 250 or 300 Hz if I need it and works really well.

Today also saw the use of zero radials. I wanted to see what the SWR would be without anything since these antennae are designed to be used without a counterpoise and just work off the coax shield and car body. I was pleasantly surprised when the nanoVNA showed 1.3 to 1 right out of the chute! Seems my antenna for the band is tuned a little low like this. If I add the 20 meter radials it balances better and move the frequency up closer to where I operate and gets that super deep null right on me.

I did experiment a little with how I laid out the coax to see what it would do and the result was minimal to say anything. I think I changed the reading by .01 SWR from start to finish. Totally not worth the extra effort to optimize the coax… The photo below shows me pointing at the best setup I found and the screen of the VNA showing my target frequency on a 4Mhz slice of spectrum.

I had problems with RF in my keyline. I am guessing due to the proximity of my key and keyer to the antenna. With electronic keying, rf can trigger the keying circuit adding unwanted dots and dashes to your code. I solved this by adding rf chokes to literally everything. If you will notice they are on the key cable as well as the keyer to radio cable and I still have that huge one on the coax as well. I have not added them to the power cables yet but might to see if it will help.

At the end of the day, all POTA is good POTA and I had a wonderful time working a ton of stations. The Ten Tec Argonaut 5 is a great little radio and I count my blessing for being able to land one for reasonable money. If you are a CW guy, then I suggest you try some of the Ten Tec radios as they are simply sublime machines for this mody. I quickly became an addict of their radios and will continue to be for many years to come. Thanks and I hope you get on the air and have some fun soon!

73 - WK4DS

Something special finally happened to me at a POTA park...

Today had been a pretty busy one at work, so afterwards I wanted to go over to K-2169 (Cloudland Canyon State Park) and just work some contacts to take my mind off things and to just relax for a while since it was 77 degrees on November 7th!

I get my sBitx V2 and head over there with the plan to run my hamsticks since I only have about 2 hours, maybe less, to get my activation in before dark. I roll up to the frisbee golf parking lot and notice another car in the lot with an antenna on the roof…a very large antenna mind you when compared to the ones you usually see on top of smaller cars.

I go ahead and park in my usual location and decide to walk over to see if there is someone in the car and THERE WAS! What do you know, I found another ham already doing POTA! It was none other than KB4QXI (John Law) and he was working SSB with a 20 meter hamstick on the roof of his car none the less. It only took me a year and a half and over 120 activations at this one park to finally run into another ham radio operator doing POTA. John had a pretty sweet system setup in his car with a computer, I assume for logging as I failed to ask him if that is what it was for, but I am pretty sure it is. He was also running a Yaesu radio of some sort on a mount that placed it right in hand’s reach but out of the way of the passenger seat, which happened to be where the computer was residing. I failed to get a photo of any of that so just let your minds run amuck with the verbal description and we will move on.

After talking with John for a while we agreed that it would be best if I setup in the next parking area down the hill which is right at 2/10s of a mile away. I personally figured that was far enough that we shouldn’t have problems with cross talk if I went to 30 meters since I was going to be operating with CW anyway since he was already on 20 meters when I arrived. I figured that if 30 meters was really bad that I could just drop down to 40 instead and work all the locals. Lol. Something else I had not noticed was that this lot had powerlines running right over it (as you can see in the above photo). I figured at this point I might as well give it a shot anyway and see if I could get the activation at the minimum. I did only have about 2 hours till the end of the UTC day at this point.

I setup three counter poise wires, you can see one of them in the photo I took above just barely because I forgot to get a closer photo prior to it getting dark… soooo. Suffice it to say, I ran out the two 30 meter tuned radials and even had the opportunity to run them elevated about 5 or 6 feet above grade, which is probably why my radio worked so well on 30 tonight to the point I didn’t move off that band. Tuned radials seem to work SO much better than radials that are just close. The key when I operate from the truck seat can vary between the Gemini and the N3ZN paddle, it just depends on the mood I am in as well as how fast I want to setup as the Gemini is in the carry tote and the paddle is in the hard case with the Argonaut 5… I normally choose my paddle based solely on things like this as I really like using them all.

After talking to some of the more code savvy hams in the email reflector on the bitx group and them helping me solve the code problem (actually they solved it and told me how to implement it), I was able to get the FT8 mode operational. It actually worked when you called CQ already and it had an issue operating when you would answer someone else calling CQ. It is a stop gap fix that does allow it to work but it doesnt work as efficiently as it should. Still it got FT8 working for me so I am stoked!

To be fair, this is Ashhar’s first iteration of this mode in his hand coded software he wrote and it does work so I got no complaints as it allows me to work the mode WITHOUT the need of an additional computer. He is currently testing a revision that works even better so I am excited to see what happens with that. In the photo above you can see the exchanges and the log entry for my QSO with K4SQL. This is all in the radio too!

On the way out, it was pitch black as it now gets dark at 5:30…uggg. Have I mentioned how much I dislike Daylight “Savings” Time? Well, I dont like it… This is a prime reason too. Even without DST being implemented, it would be dark at 8PM in November. Regardless, I had to use a flash light to break down my antenna tonight.

I powered down and quit before the UTC day flipped over as that would have forced me to stay two more hours to get a second activation in…lol. I do need one more activation at this park to get me over 4000 QSOs. I never planned on getting that many QSOs at one park to be honest, my only goal to start off with was to get 20 activations so I could get the repeat offender award, now I am well north of 120 activations and almost 4000 QSOs! By the time this blog post goes live, I should be past that mark.

Something else of note is that I am currently still logging my FT8 QSOs on my paper log and typing them into HAMRS as there isnt that many of them at this point and I can easily keep up with this quantity manually instead of learning how to export them from the radio and then add them to my HAMRS log electronically or even a new logging program of some sort instead. There will be a point when I will have to do that, but for now I can still get them in the log like this really easily. So till next time warm up the air waves with your radio and hopefully I will work you from a park!

73

WK4DS

DX QSL Cards are Awesome!!!

I once did 100% QSL with paper cards… those days are long gone though. It turned into this huge project to keep up with them to the point that I spent more time working on the QSL cards than I did on the air.

It was at this point that I decided to alter my strategy for QSL management to the one I am using currently. This strategy led to me getting this letter in the mail.

My current (and sustainable as well) process is to cherry pick the QSOs I send cards to. I have some criteria that I use though.

• Ragchews almost always get a card. If the other op doesn’t QSL I wont but usually I send one for this.

• QRP contacts whether from my home or abroad will also usually get a card. To clarify that is they are QRP. I work it so much that I dont use my radio as a factor. Same exclusions as above here too.

• DX if it is a country I have never worked before. Actually this criteria is a mandatory QSL…as long as they do QSL.

• If I just want to is the last one.

So back in July, I did a POTA activation at K-2169 and used my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 transceiver for the activation. On that day the bands were in great shape and so I start On 15 meters and after a while moved down to 17 meters to get a few contacts in the log. I felt pretty confident 17 would be good as I had already worked two DX stations on 15 meters. Albeit fairly close to home, but they were still DX none the less.

Well, I work several US hams and they are coming in sporadically but then I hear this station that is clean but weak. I thought at first I had missed the first letter of his call as I heard a J next, we went through the “on air gymnastics” of asking for the call again and when I got it, I was blown away to realize it was a Japan station!!! I had to send him a card! So I write one out and check his QRZ and he does QSL, so threw in a few green stamps to help offset his costs and off it went into the mail. Today, I got my reply…

In the photo above you will see three cards, one is handwritten, one ís typed and one is a different card altogether. The odd one is an extra card he sent that was his old QSL. That is awesome to me. I love getting these in the mail. If you will notice he has a 4 element beam so that combined with good band conditions allowed my 20 watts to reach him in Japan.

It is interesting to me that I will get so accustomed to hearing the 4 US call letters first that when I hear one from somewhere else, it “breaks my brain” for lack of a better term. I am listening so much for A, N, W & K that I completely miss the other letters most of the time. I actually can catch V calls pretty good now as I have worked many since starting POTA activating regularly but it is the exception. This has prompted me to listen on the bands more to try to hear DX calls and not lose my marbles when I hear one… lol. I copied a Swedish station the other day first try and was kinda stoked so my practice is working. But this is a side effect of being a US amateur working a lot of POTA in the eastern USA, you do get accustomed to hearing certain prefixes a lot (or at least I do). I have a bunch of those stories if you want me to recount them at some point…

Do you have any odd idiosyncrasies that you run into while operating on the air? Let’s hear them! Till next time 72

de WK4DS - David

The weather can be fickle…

We went to my local park (K-2169) to do a little POTA and to enjoy the nice weather there.

I setup at the canyon rim today in the shade and got my rig setup in my usual tree and everything. I look on the web and the MUF showed that 17 meters was open and I dialed around and did hear stations so that was promising. I tuned up the antenna on an open frequency and started calling CQ…and called and called …and called. No one answered my calls for something like 10 straight minutes. I even had someone respot me once but never heard anyone on the air

I even took a few minutes to confirm that the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and the Ten Tec 277 Antenna tuner were set correctly with my nanoVNA. They were in fact set correctly…so I just wasn’t being heard on 17 meters. Probably because I am only using 15 watts from the Argonaut. Maybe because the band sucked like a Hoover vacuum cleaner that day, who knows…

This antenna tuner is the Ten Tec 277. It has options to connect a COAX to an antenna, a balanced line to the antenna and even a random wire input (which is what I was using on this day) The variety of connections is what led me to acquire it in the first place, I like the ability to use it with any antenna I have and it works quite well in that role. It is easy to tune and the SWR meter works well too. I don’t use it as a traditional SWR meter though, I use it to watch for changes in the antenna system. If the SWR starts to climb then I know something is changing and I need to look into it, I have had things like the counterpoise wire break in the crimp lug before and not realize it due to it being inside the heat shrink tubing and this meter showed it to me. It also works for tuning purposes if I forget my nanoVNA as well.

My nanoVNA kit is almost entirely adapters and the tiny little VNA over to the side. I love this device and wonder how I got along without one before.

Anyway, back to that activation on that day. Since17 meters was apparently turned off by this point, it was with a heavy heart that I QSY-ed to 40 meters. I tuned up and started calling on this band and it didn’t take long to get someone in the log. After getting quite a few “locals” on 40 meters, I shifted my focus up to 20 meters. For me with my low antennas in park activations I will normally get closer states on 40 meters and more distant stations on 20 meters and higher. That is one of the reasons I like 17 and 15 so much. When they are open I have had great performance with DX stations. If you look at the map below, the close in contacts are all the 40 meter contacts and some of the closer ones are 20 meters.

I just love maps like this one where there is this one lone QSO way off.

It was about this time that the storm clouds really started to look ominous on the western horizon. But they didn’t really seem to be moving closer so I kept going. Well, 20 meters was open is all I can say. My very first QSO on 20 meters was with G3WPF in the UK! I actually thought he was an American station and I was missing the first letter so I had him repeat it a couple of times…lol. I am glad he didnt give up as I figured it out finally and got him in the log. What an awesome way to hop on 20 meters with! DX right out of the chute!!!

As can be seen from the logbook, I had a decent run on 20 meters before two things happened at basically the same time. The storm started to move into the area, and another ham tuned up on top of me and I couldn’t hear stations anymore. I chalk it up to them not being able to hear me as I was only 15 watts into a random wire pretty low to the ground. Anyway, that was enough to get me to call QRT and pack it all up before it got wet.

Until next time I hope to hear you on the air!

de WK4DS 72

Component failure sucks…

When things dont go right it can be frustrating but when things are like my activation recently they are downright demoralizing…

So I had an evening free and wanted to do some POTA so I decide to setup in the truck with my hamsticks … since it is faster… you know since everything is ready to go. Little did I know what I was about to get into.

So I goto the frisbee golf parking area and get everything out to do an in-truck activation. This is how I operate if it is raining and has worked well for me in the past. I just tape a “rain shield” to the coax connector made from a peanut package with both ends cut out. Haha, reuse at its finest. But today, I didnt need it since it was not raining.

Next I break out the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and my N3ZN cw key and connect it with my HamGadgets PicoKeyer and I am all set. Another thing with today is I planned to activate with my 8Ah LiFePO4 battery to see if it can handle an activation with the Argonaut 5. I have my inline power meter this time so I can monitor the voltage too. I also can monitor Amp/hour usage but completely forgot to do this since I got wrapped up in other things. I setup this kit in the cab of the truck as you see so that I could sit comfortably while being in the truck. This works really well when I am solo, but gets tougher if I bring someone with me. As you can see below it was up to almost 3 Ah by the time I took this photo. I wished I had thought to get a photo of it at the end to have that data. I guess I will have to do it again… lol.

But before all this got started I connected my antenna and wanted to check the SWR before starting as I have been experimenting with the radials some here lately and have learned some interesting things about them. I get out my nanoVNA and connect it to the antenna and it shows like it isn’t there…at all. I mess with the VNA a while and try to see if it might have a loose adapter on the VNA or if the calibration might have been done wrong, which I found not to be the case after calibrating it again… Nothing in the VNA was wrong, so I get out of the truck and inspect the antenna and it looks right, nothing is out of the ordinary. I go back and get my trusty little multimeter and decide to ohm the center pin of the coax to the shield to see what it measures, it should be open to the meter…it isn’t, quite the opposite actually, it is shorted. So I immediately go to the antenna and disconnect my brand new, reputable brand coax and check it with it removed from the antenna, it measures good now. Whew! That was close! I didn’t want my new coax to be bad right out of the chute.

So now that I am pretty sure it isn’t the coax, I turn my attention to the antenna. I remove the radiator and test the base to center pin and it reads shorted!! What in the world is going on here!?!? I look closely at the mount, which at this point has the BNC to PL259 adapter on it and nothing else and so I remove the top portion of the antenna mount to make sure water has not entered the plate where it passed through and has created a path with corrosion to the mount. Nope, not there, it looks perfect.

So I remove the adapter and the short goes away immediately. I reinstall it and it returns. I remove the adapter and check it and it measures fine and so does the antenna mount now. What gives? Well, I had a new adapter I picked up at the hamfest from the Wireman and I just installed it to see what would happen. The problem vanished. I tried wiggling the antenna and the coax and pushed and pulled on the adapter and the meter didn’t change a bit, all I can figure is that something in the other adapter is shorting when the adapter bottoms out on the antenna mount at the point where it gets tight.

This is what went bad. On the surface from every angle it looks perfect, but when tightened in place it produces a dead short across the antenna to ground. Don’t blindly think that simple things like this can’t fail. Obviously they can. I will be more diligent in checking my system routinely too. The Argonaut 5 has no SWR meter on it, which is pretty much the only thing about it I don’t like, so I have to use other means of monitoring the SWR. The VNA was that tool today.

Once that was sorted out, I was able to get on the air and make some contacts. Since I was dancing with the end of the UTC day, I figured I would start on 20 meters to improve my odds of getting an activation before the day flips over. The hunters came in clutch and I EASILY made the activation. Once I cleared all the calling stations, I QSYed to 17 meters to see what I could do there as the band was open earlier…before I found the bad antenna adapter…

Turns out 17 meters right during grey line to the west coast will net some cool contacts. All but one are from the west coast and that is always fun as I rarely get to work California due to noise on the bands. All in all, I netted 41 contacts in the log all before the UTC day ended. So it all worked out anyway. Moral to the story is two fold. The first one is to take extra parts for your system and two is don’t assume anything… this adapter looked perfect visually but did not work when installed. Have fun y’all and I hope to hear you on the air soon.

PS: Another perk to working POTA is things like these photos I grabbed of the clouds. You normally don’t see these at home in the house. If I had stayed home or threw in the towel on the antenna (which I almost did) I would not have seen these beautiful sunset clouds.

73 de WK4DS

July 1 2023 Morning Activation AAR

It was perfect weather and my operating position could not have been better today…

Today started out like any other day… (I have always wanted to start a story like that…lol) I loaded up the radio gear for the day, the Penntek TR-35, a TenTec 277 antenna tuner and a 41’ random wire antenna that I built for my trip to Hawaii last Febuary. (There is a write up about that from back in March if I am right)

I set up the radio today at the canyon rim since I wanted to use a wire antenna and this requires throwing a line up in the trees. I have my favorite picnic table that is right in the middle of the trees and is kinda out of the way of the hikers in the area as well. I throw the line up into the tree and it didnt get very high…uggg… Pull it out and rethrow it, again, and again… FINALLY get it about where I wanted it and ran with it. Not optimal as the antenna was running over some branches at the top but it was arial so I let it ride. I also just tied the throw weight to the line and left it suspended to maintain the tension on the antenna and not have to tie it off. I set the box that I carried my extra widgets in, under the throw line and weight to keep people from accidentally walking into it as it was hard to see and people did occasionally come by. I am pointing to the weight in the photo below…see what I mean?

I bought this Ten Tec Model 277 tuner on Flea-bay for really reasonable money and it is in excellent condition too. I like it as it is made by Ten Tec and it has connections for a coax, balanced line and a random wire antenna on it, this versatility is not on all tuners out there and makes this one really desirable for me. It is a simple design with a tapped coil inductor and two air variable capacitors. The SWR meter was just icing on the cake, I dont use it to tune most of the time, but rather the nanoVNA as it shows the “tune” of the system graphically and makes it easier for me to get done much faster. But what is good about the swr meter is that is the antenna changes or I bump a knob on the tuner or anything like that, it will show me instantly that the system is compromised and needs attention. That is a nice perk to be honest.

I also built out this simple kit for my nanoVNA to keep all the widgets I have accumulated for it, all in one place so I have what ever I need when I use it. This makes operating with the VNA a breeze. The yellow case was something I picked up at a hamfest from Gigaparts for cheap and it works perfectly for this job.

Here is a look at the antenna “kit” that I have put together. i learned a while back that it is simpler to find the things you want if you label them clearly. Hence the flagged counter poise and radiator. Also shown are the throw weight I made in the machine shop and the arborist 2mm throw line I also picked up at Gigaparts in Huntsville AL.

Here is the star of the show for the day, the Penntek TR-35 amateur radio. This radio is CW only and has a strong output setup that is pretty much impossible to damage with several temperature and current over protection circuits built into it. I have made a metric ton of contacts on this radio and today was no exception. Although the log sheet is light on quantity, the ones I did get are awesome! I even got an email from WA6YPE showing me his QRP rig that he called me with using a mag loop antenna in UTAH!!! I was also QRP at 5 watts going to him too. When the bands are “on” it doesnt take a lot of transmitter power to go a long way.

I also made another small goal for this day, I was able to make at least one contact on each band the radio is built to use. It is a personal little goal when I have a tunable antenna like this wire with me. If I am using the hamsticks, I can also do it then but it is more work on my part and a lot of the time I dont want to put out the radials for the other bands and will just use 20 and 40 only since they share radials… lol.

Also of note is that I worked DX for the 2nd day in a row that was not Canada (which I still consider DX for me). Today I was dialing aroudn on 17 meters and found XE1CT calling CQ and he was booming into my radio, so I thought he might just be able to hear me too. I threw my call sign to him and he came right back! Even though it is just Mexico which is actually no further than states like Arizona or Idaho, it still makes me happy to work them. There is just something about making contact with a foreign country that is special for me since I normally only activate with QRP power only.

If you think activating a park is hard, dont let it stop you, it is really fun. I have literally only had one outing where I didnt get the activation and that was my fault since I setup on a little used band, with a QRP radio, on a day when the bands were terrible and did so 45 minutes before the end of the UTC day too. Chalk it up to “giving it a shot” and it was still fun. Most of the time if you will just hop on 20 meters right quick, you can get the activation required 10 QSOs out of the way and then if you want to try to get contacts on other bands or modes or what have you, then at least you know you have the activation in the bag first. Simple tactic but it works perfectly for me.

Some days I am bolder and will set up shop on 17 meters and dig out the activation there before.I go elsewhere, but if I am pushed for time or something like bad band conditions, 20 meters is my goto solution. It pretty much always gets my activation. Just a tidbit if your thinking about activating a park sometime and have not done it yet…

A “quickie” POTA activation…lol

What happens when you plan to do something “right quick”? That’s right, it doesn’t happen like that at all. Haha.

I had about an hour of free time today between activities with the XYL and K-2169 was … technically… on the way to meet her, so LET’S POTA!

K-2169 Cloudland Canyon State Park is a 15 minute drive from my house so if you look at that park on the POTA site, you will find I go there a lot. Today, I wanted to get setup quicker than normal, which means I opted for the lower parking lot. This parking area is next to the canyon proper and is where I like to setup my wire antennas in the warmer months.

The lower lot was pretty sparse so I was able to get in a corner, out of the way, which also afforded me the ability to use the side of the truck to shade me from the setting sun. I grabbed a camp chair out of the back of the truck, threw up the 17m hamstick and got on the air. The truck tire made the perfect “table” for the Penntek TR-35 QRP radio too. I used the battery to tie down the coax so it would not slide off the truck and pile up on me (like it did right before I sat the battery on it) and made the station nice and tidy.

I started on 17m calling CQ as I heard quite a few stations having QSOs. After calling CQ for a few minutes I got an answer from NA7C in Utah and then a little later KJ7DT came in strong as well from Idaho. But then I called for a long time with nothing coming back so I decided to change bands and see if I could finish up on 20 meters.

Once on 20 meters, I found a clear spot and started calling CQ again. Just a moment later KJ7DT came back again! This time even stronger!!! Idaho was booming into Georgia today. That gave me hope! So I worked Paul leisurely, as he was the only one to answer my call, and then cleared him to find myself in a ginormous pileup! Where did everybody come from!?!?!? Good Lord I had trouble pulling out single stations. I have never really had to deal with a legit pileup before. Oh sure, I have had 4 or 5 stations call at once but this sounded like 20 or 30! I start plucking out callsigns and in the process of the next 38 minutes I put 38 QSOs in the log. That has to be some sort of a record for me!

Some items of note from today that I found interesting were that I worked KJ7DT back to back on two bands without coordinating that with him, then I ended up working three DX stations today with one of those being DL1AX in Germany, another was VO1SW in Canada and finally CU3DI in the Azores! I even worked a Park to Park for a 2Fer! Sweet! Speaking of sweet, the dogwood trees are in full bloom as well making for a beautiful scene on top of a 40 QSO run on my tiny little QRP radio in just under an hour and that includes an antenna change!

Check out the QSO map I got from the HAMRS app showing the spread. Side note about HAMRS, if the op isn’t found in the Hamdb database, then search them on QRZ and get their grid square and add it to the QSO info if you want them to show up on the QSO map. This is how I get non-POTA ops to show up.

Here is the USA map without the tags so you can see the radiation dispersion of my 5 watts and a hamstick antenna.

I think that I could have most likely worked most of these ops today with SSB and it would have been successful. 20 meters was that strong today. This comes on the heels of the previous evening where I worked Ian in New Zealand on 10 meters via greyline! This has been a good 24 hours for radio! Confirmed via QRZ in real time no less! I am sending him a real QSL card anyway but that always gets me excited. It isn’t everyday that I can even hear New Zealand on 10 meters much less them hear me.

Here is another tidbit about me. If at all possible, I will always clear the pileup before going QRT as I know some of them are needing my park for one of their goals and if I can help them with their goal, whatever it might be, I want to do that. I had not initially planned on staying for an hour but it was so rewarding that I just couldn’t power down the rig. Lol

Today was a pleasant surprise and I look forward to more like it in the future.

72 and I hope to hear you on the radio!

de WK4DS

Activating a park in Hawaii with with the Elecraft K1

I will be honest here, I thought this would be easier…

Let me explain. You see first off, I live on the east coast of the mainland USA where getting an activation completed or even dozens of QSOs in an activation, is rather easy even at QRP power levels. I have done activations with 4 watts and once I think it was only 1 watt. But someone joked in the past, “that is because you are where all the HAMs are at!” Nothing could be truer as I found out.

So here is the setup for the opportunity. We decide after some travel plans fall through, to goto Hawaii (the big island) for a week or so. This is two fold, we want to see the active volcano as that is a bucket list item for us and it is warm in February…which is always a plus. Well, I talk to the wife and come to the conclusion that there will be time to do a park or two while we are there as well. So I start figuring out what radio to bring.

Just read the previous blog post to see what I brought and why (spoiler, it is the Elecraft K1). So once I figured out the radio and storage/travel bag, I started looking for parks on the POTA app.

We are staying in the town of Hilo so I naturally started looking near there for possible parks. My criteria was that I wanted a park that wasn’t blocked by mountains or in a canyon, preferably one near the beach (I mean, who doesn’t want to do an activation on the beach???) and has a tree to allow me to get the antenna up as close to vertical as possible. This last part is going to be the biggest challenge I would come to find out. Since I packed only wire antennas in my kit, I would need something I could throw a line over to haul up a wire with.

Well, the first park I chose was not really suitable as it didnt have any trees near the parking lot and also no tables nears the trees that are there. The next problem showed up on day two and lasted till almost time to leave…the rain… seems Hilo is a literal rain forest and I failed to do the proper research to learn this ahead of time. Maybe I was not supposed to know this so I would take my gear, I don’t know either way, but it rained 14” of rainfall in a 36 hour period of time at one point. yes, FOURTEEN inches fell in a 36 hour period… The rain was near continuous for many days. Well, on day four, we had about 3 hours to kill in the afternoon so I looked at a park in Hilo proper, it is down by the beach and runs all the way down the the royal gardens. I drove by it and scouted the area and found some trees that would hold a wire. This is park number K-6407 (Wailoa River State Recreation Area) and basically it fit all the criteria.

This is where it gets messy… I decide to give it a try as it is a good time of day to reach the west coast of the US. Grey line would be coming across the US for the next few hours and I need all the help I can get with my measly 7 watts. The only problem is that the rain is coming down in sheets at this point… where to setup??? I opted for the car.

So I get out in the deluge and throw a line over a nearby tree and haul up the antenna which turned out to be more of a sloper this time than a vertical. This antenna is a 41’ radiator and a 13’ counterpoise and is almost resonant on the 40 meter band. I roll the window down a little and run the counter poise and radiator into the car and hook then to the radio.

Once the radio was connected I tried to run the car for the heater and power port only to find it was producing a significant amount of rf hash that the little Elecraft radio couldn’t handle. So I got out the battery and shutoff the car. This actually worked really well, I could hear much better and the car was actually quite warm so I and Teresa were happy. Yep, she sat with me in the car and read a book which I worked you guys on HF.

The next problem I ran into was the contest… I had no idea there was a contest running this weekend and had planned around that literally zero… Well, now what? I went to where I couldn’t hear anyone and started calling CQ and called for ten straight minutes with no answers.

You can see in the log that I got on the air and spent ten minutes finding a clear frequency and called CQ for probably 20 minutes before giving up and moving to 17 meters. Now remember that the whole time this is happening that it is pouring rain. So I am starting to lose hope…

17 meters proved to be MUCH more productive. I found a clear spot tuned up and went to work. Here it still took several minutes of calling for people to hear me. I am going to guess they swung their beams around to me as some of them came booming in to my little wire in the middle of the ocean! I was starting to get somehwere when it seemed my band opening on 17 just stopped so I tried the 30 meter band in hopes of getting something there but no one replied. Next I figured I would give 20 meters another try. I went fairly high in the CW area to get away from the contesters and it seemed to work. I did get a couple of contacts, but it was at this point that I had to pack it up so we could go to the airport to pick up our daughter who was flying in… with 7 QSOs in the log. I really wanted to get this activation and as fate would have it, I started right after the new UTC day began so I actually had time. This was the most difficult hour and half of my POTA life thus far. I had netted 7 contacts in over 90 minutes of air time…I had not anticipated this. Normally, due to the spot page, I get an activation in short order. I have a new appreciation for Hawaii call signs now that I could not have before.

The next thing that happened was fate working in my “POTA” favor. You see the airline let Sierra wait in Maui for an extra two hours due to issues with the gates in the airport. So since the airport in Hilo is 10 minutes from this park I was activating, we just drove back over to the park and I found a better tree to get the wire almost completely vertical this time.

Launching into the “second session” I got on 30 meters hoping to get something there but nobody answered me after quite a while. So I just moved back to 20 meters and again went high in the CW portion. I have never went to 14080 mhz before so I wasn’t sure how this would work. It worked fairly well to be honest, as I got my activation completed during this time part of the time!!!

Since I had my 10 QSOs finally, I wanted to try and work someone on every band I could use on the radio which meant moving down to 40 meters for a while. I finally worked NA7C in Utah on 40 meters with just 7 watts!!!!! I also learned from the RBN that my K1 needs to be aligned. It was consistently off frequency by at least 200 hertz.

So for this trip I took the Gemini travel key as I really like the form factor of this key for these kinds of operations. It is the perfect size and design for ops where there is no surface to set the key on. Also take notice how my trousers are still very wet from stringing the antenna up in the tree. Lol. I wondered how much signal I was losing to the rain… The logbook is a mess because of the terrible band conditions and me making tons of notes about the activation.

Take a look at my original spot note. Lol I had a big idea there!!!

I was also hopeful when I saw the RBN pick me up. So I knew my signal was propagating out to the mainland. You can understand then why I was getting worried when I got no calls for all that time I was calling CQ on 20 meters…

Here you can see my RBN spot on 17 meters as well. It was weak, but it spotted from two different regions. Check that out. But it was during this time that people actually start hearing me and answering!

I was really impressed by some of the signals too. These people have wonderful radio stations and they are my heros to be honest. Below is a spot from the second session of when I had a couple more hours due to the fight delays and was able to finish the activation.

The QSO map looks a lot like I thought it would other than I didn’t expect the mid west and eastern contacts at all. I also figured on a few Japan contacts to be honest, I really thought I would get a couple with how active the Japanese people are in POTA. I only heard a few “J” calls the whole time and none of them could hear me. So when I was spotted by 5W1SA in Samoa then again by VE6WZ in Canada I was just sure I would get some Japan calls, but nothing. Figures. Maybe I did the grey line wrong…who knows.

So when I wrapped up the activation, the antenna was drowned and when I got back to the room I spread all of it out to dry. Note it took more than one day to dry since it rains here almost nonstop and the humidity wont let the stuff dry very fast. It probably won’t be done drying ít till I get home.

Well, that is the story of my activation from the isle of Hawaii while I was on vacation. Thank you for reading along and now go have some fun! What is your most insane story about an activation? Leave me a comment below and let’s have some fun.

Today I activated the smallest park I have personally ever seen.

This activation included me having to use my backpack rig in its entirety. I used the ICOM IC-705, wire antenna and the rest of the whole kit from the normal pack I use.

I have been wanting to activate this park since we arrived in Tampa over a week and a half ago, but the park is closed on certain days and I had to arrange it to where I would be in Ybor city, and the park would be open at the same time…with good weather. Today was that day.

I even found a good parking space relatively close to the park and only had the walk about one block. This is unusual for me, as I am never able to find parking that is even remotely close to the location I want to go. So the Lord was already looking down on me on this day.

So this park is really nothing more than a museum with a large patio area that is also fenced with a huge brick and wrought iron wall, on the side of the museum. It sits on about 1/2 of one city block of space, this includes both “park” and building.

So today it is only me, a chicken and the park employees who were cleaning the fountain while I was there.

Ybor city has some sort of ordinance that protects the chickens, and there are chickens literally everywhere.

So in order to draw less attention to me and to not risk getting thrown out of the park for putting antennas in the trees, I opted not to throw a line into the trees to haul up an antenna, but rather instead, ran it across the back corner area and fixed the end of the antenna to the top of the fence gate as shown in the photo.

I ran the radials along the ground. I know this is not a very good setup, but I really only wanted to get the activation and then go shoot some photography as well.

Well, I started on 15 meters since I could see it was open and actually made several contacts there before moving to 17 meters. 17 meters actually netted me some contacts today too!!! Boy howdy! Today, even with my terrible antenna setup, I have landed an activation and still have yet to goto 20 meters. This is in large part to a team of dedicated hunters who are listening with good receivers and MUCH better antennas than what I am using. 20 meters netted several more contacts and I shut down after 50 minutes.

Way back over there in the back is where you can see the table that I used for the activation. It is kinda nice to have a big table to spread all the gear out on when you are doing an activation. Plus, in the middle of the day there is little to no activity in this park so I didn’t have to share space with anyone else too. If I could have escaped the band noise, and put the antenna in the tree (to be honest I probably could have if I had just done it quietly) and it would have been an epic activation.

The whole rig packs really neatly into this old camera bag. Thanks to KV9L for the idea on repurposing a camera bag for my POTA gear. That was genius of him and I had about 4 bags just sitting in the corner not being used at all…

I tied the end of my wire to the top of the wrought iron fence (which I think is actually aluminum but who’s checking?) and then laid it on top of some bushes in between my radio tuner and the fence to get it off the ground a little. I am obviously getting some capacitive coupling with the fence and this may be why I got as many contacts as I did. I also used 10 watts and not 5 today for all but 2 of the contacts… I know it says 5 on the log, but I made the note, that after the second QSO I turned it up to 10 after I took this photo. Something quite rare for me is to run more than 5 watts, but as you can see in the reports, people were barely able to copy me and then it was much easier after that with 10 watts. Once things got going I forgot to turn it back down and so you have it… From the map below, it looks like decent single hop propagation and since I was running such low power and a terrible antenna, I am happy to see even this many contacts.

Got K9IS in the log on two different bands today, that is kinda cool and I am starting to recognize several other calls that are showing up in my logs more and more. K4RUM, W8NGA, and WA9VFD area calls I have seen before that I am aware of, I am slowly trying to put names to these calls too as I like to learn the first name if possible. This is just something I like to do.

This is the remote tuner for the IC-705, It is designed to be used with it and it is actually designed to be strung up in the trees as a remote tuner. I made up a 6 foot cable for it that has the power, tuner control and coax all in one cable so it stores more conveniently. It is rolled up in the bag photo on the top right corner of the bag, I just used the spiral wire loom to make up the cable, that way when one of the three cables wears out, I can replace it easily.

Here is the view from the end of one of the radials to the tuner module. I ran two 10’ radials in opposite directions to help the wire get out.

The antenna ran up to this fence section across those bushes, so as you can see, it was really low to the ground. This still got me an activation though so I am happy with it.

You can see the park employee in the background where they were cleaning the fountain. This is why I didn’t bother putting up a wire or even asking about radio, since I was running CW, I wore headphones and I don’t think they even knew what I was doing. No one ever came over to see…

Here you can see the power setup for running the external battery, I run a power distribution block with power poles so I can plug in the tuner and the radio power, then I run them through a power meter back to the battery. Both the radio and the tuner have separate fuses for them so none of the devices are powered without fuse protection.

There was a good bit of rf hash in the area, but then again, there are numerous neon signs and no telling what else in the area, it is right smack dab in the middle of the city here so all bets are off here… I could still hear pretty well once I dialed the filters in a little better.

All in all, it was a great activation and I am happy to add Ybor City Museum to my list of parks. I think I have activated as many parks in Florida now as I have in Georgia! LOL Anyway, get that radio out and power that sucker on!!!

72 (well this time I was using 10 watts so 73 haha)

David WK4DS

Activating POTA site K-5524 in central Florida in January 2023

So I am staying in Tampa Florida for a few weeks in January of 2023 and brought a couple of QRP radios with me just in case I had time to do some POTA… Well, this worked out and I did get to do a few activations.

Welcome to Chito Branch Reserve. This is a really nice place tucked into the bustling metropolis of Brandon…or more commonly known as a suburb of Tampa FL… LOL, it is a really nice little area and I was glad to see some people actually using the site for something other than a HAM getting a POTA activation. The lot next to the truck was for horse trailers, but was locked. While I was there, there were two different groups of people that showed up to use the land as well as me. One guy was going on a bird watching adventure and the other was a dad with his two sons who played with several RC machines till all the batteries were drained.

I checked all the maps I could find and from everything I was able to figure out, the parking lot is fully inside the boundaries so I was able to setup the truck-tenna and use it as my power source too.This makes setup a lot more simple as I don’t have to use the throw line and try to hang wire antennas in the trees. I also didn’t know if that was even allowed here either so I was apprehensive about doing that at first.

If you will notice in the photos of the parking area that it is really small, this comes into play a little later when the wife of the guy with his two boys, shows up for a minute. You see when I arrived there was no one there at all and deployed the antenna radials left, and right of the truck. This was not a problem until the fellow with the RC airplane, crashed it into a palm tree and could not get it loose. He ended up calling his wife to bring him a pole so he could fish the airplane out of the tree. When she arrived, she ran squarely over the radial on the other side of the truck. Fortunately, since it is in place with only a weight, it was not a problem to simply pull the wire out from under the car and repositioned it. They apologized profusely, but I told them that it was simply a piece of speaker wire, and it was not a big deal as I had already broken it a couple of times myself and laughed. He retrieved the stick, and then promptly got the airplane out of the palm tree and proceeded to fly until the battery went dead about 20 minutes later lol.

There was some sort of QRM at this site too, but it was not near as bad as the other site. The QRM was some sort of thumping that would happen every so many seconds like clockwork, it was almost like WWV, but more spaced out in time. It was also wide band as it covered the entire amateur 20 m band at once with a single pulse. It wouldn’t run up the band. It was the whole band at once so this was some sort of broad-spectrum noise, whatever it was.

This was not really a problem as I was able to turn down the RF gain about 10% and almost completely eliminated it so I didn’t have to really listen to it all that much. What is it with Florida and these band noise issues that I do not have back home on top of lookout mountain? Lol

I just love the look of the Spanish moss in the trees down here, it has this “ancient” kind of look to it…

Having the cigarette lighter adapter and a Anderson power pole on the end of the cord is a godsend for a QRP POTA operation. The power port in the truck is rated for 15 amps and the cord I bought has a 10 amp fuse in it, so there is no danger of problems there as none of my QRP rigs pull more than 5 amps max. I also had enough cord to reach all the way to the bed cover of the truck so I was able to set up outside and not have to sit inside the truck to do my operation. The weather being as nice as it was I wanted to do that instead. In the photo below you can see the common mode choke I made out of a toroid to keep RF noise out of the radio, I am going to test this to see how much attenuation it produces with my nanoVNA at some point…

I got some new calls in my log since I am 500 miles from home, I have a new areas to call into, like Tennessee and North Carolina!!! Also, I looked, and this is my fourth state! To activate a new state for me is a pretty big deal as I do not travel by vehicle to the states outside of my local area very often. Woo hoo! 46 to go! ha ha ha! Honestly, I do not ever expect to get all 50 states in the log as activating, but it is fun to get a new one when I can.

The operating position for this day. Today I used my ICOM IC705 transceiver and my little travel paddles from a previous blog post, and my headphones that I normally use on the TR35 transceiver. I normally do not use headphones with the 705, but today it was windy and there was a lot of car noise as cars would go by on the highway just a few meters away. Wearing headphones almost completely eliminated this noisy environment and made it easy to copy CW.

This is the bucket of extra stuff I brought in case of problems and it has helped a lot on this trip already. I threw this container of random stuff in the truck before I left, as I wanted to make sure that I did not have a project like an activation get shut down over something as mundane as a cable failing. Also, do not laugh at the small, cheapo multimeter. It works and I was able to do several little simple, troubleshooting type things with it and it also is very small, light weight and compact. Sometimes the simple little cheapie ones work great for what you need them for… Another perk to the cheap multimeter is that if I drop and break it or do something to it in the field and it gets destroyed or someone carries it off or any number of terrible fates, I am only out a few bucks and it doesn’t hurt me as bad as the nice Fluke brand meters I have at home.

38 QSOs in the log is a pretty good day for me, Especially since one is from across the Atlantic ocean!!! MM5DWW was booming into my location and when I looked him up on QRZ, I saw why. This man has an antenna farm to die for, nice kit OM, hope to work you again soon! I am thankful to the Lord that nothing went wrong and that I had wonderful weather too. If you enjoyed this blog post, I would appreciate a like, and if you would share it to your friends, so that I can grow this page.

Thank you, and 72 until next time. WK4DS

Trouble activating K-1878 Hillsborough River State Park in Florida!

I ran into some problems with the area I was in but worked through them and even grabbed a photo of some local wildlife. So let’s get started…

Finally!!! I GOT MY FOURTH STATE!!! Lol. We had went to Tampa Florida for a few weeks to escape the winter in North Georgia and so I grabbed a couple of radios for some POTA fun.

First, a little about the park. This park was easy to get to and it is a big loop through the wilderness area with pull offs as you go around. There are hiking trails, camping areas as well as playgrounds and other facilities on site. They even have a small outfitters store in the center of the park. All of the parking spaces are pull in angled from the road as you see in the photos throughout the entire park except for the very first one where there is a small visitor area with a historical reference section.

The park is beautiful, and basically shows you what a wild Florida would look like if it was not covered in houses and strip malls. The park does require a fee to access it and you pay when you pull into the entrance.

There is a guard shack and they collect the fee there. I had several park employees travel by my setup while I was operating and no one gave it a second look. I believe this is because my set up is very low impact as the radials are held in place by weights, and the antenna is actually connected to my truck and freestanding.

This parking created a small challenge for me as I tend to need to back into the spaces so that I can deploy my antenna ground system. My solution to this problem was to drive around the Park until I found a section of the parking lot that was vacant of cars. Once I found a vacant parking lot, I could pretty much choose where I wanted to put my truck, so I put it in the furthest corner from any infrastructure which typically lends itself to not ever being in anyone’s way.

As a sidenote, once I had finished my activation, I realized that there was a observer watching from a nearby tree. I am pretty certain this is a red shouldered hawk and it’s very beautiful. There were several of them in the park and I happened to see this one fly down and catch something small on the ground and then flew up to this tree branch in a nearby small tree, where he sat (or she I’m not sure which) until I was able to get my camera and walk over there and take a photo of it.

Onto the Amateur Radio portion of this adventure. Once I found a spot to get out of the way, and that was far from any structures that I could find, I parked in the corner of the parking lot, deployed my antenna system and got out my ICOM IC-705 radio. This is where the trouble began, I learned quickly that there was some sort of interference that was washing over the entire CW portion of the 20 m band. I did not even bother to check the other bands as the only antenna I deployed today was a 20m hamstick.

I jokingly considered it to be similar to the “Russian woodpecker” of days of yore as it sounded like that every few kC. I am pretty sure it is the radar installation at the Zephyrhills municipal Airport as I was in the direct flight path to the runway. My antenna being a vertically oriented radial, is a very noisy antenna anyway so I am leaning towards this deduction to the problem. I have heard RF hash from other devices, and none of them have ever sounded like this. It literally sounded like a woodpecker.

Combine that with the fact that I was only 7 miles distant from the airport. I also had aircraft going overhead occasionally as well. This is what clued me in that the airport was somewhere nearby, and that I was in the flight path, I kept hearing airplanes lol.

I tried a couple of different things to see if the problem would go away and figured out really quick that it was not with my system, and that I could only work with what was there. I even turned down the RF gain in an attempt to hide the noise from me, but that didn’t really help since I would be transmitting sometimes on top of this noise, and that would make people not able to hear me calling CQ. What I wound up doing was looking for a section of the band between the noise spots and setting up in those areas. I finally found a couple near the QRP calling frequency and started calling CQ.

This worked really well as I was able to quickly get 20 QSOs in the log in about 30 minutes. I even got a few of the guys, that I normally get back in Georgia, in the log as well, such as K9IS for instance.

The set up today consisted of the 20m hamstick with radials piped into the truck to the 705 direct with no tuner. The power from the truck powering the radio out of the cigarette lighter port and I was using my little portable travel key that I bought off eBay and that was it, very simple.

So, I guess the moral of the story is don’t give up, even if you have something like the Russian woodpecker beating down your receiver. Just find a spot that is as clear as you can get it and try from there, you never know what you will find.

Thanks and 72

WK4DS

How well do compromise antennas actually work?

Well, they work really good…for what they are.

3 DEC 2022 TenTec Argonaut 5 @ 5watts CW into the 20 meter Hamstick.

To expound on this simple statement, I have been using a 20 meter hamstick for a while now and making charts of my contacts to see how well they work by looking at the direction, distance, and minimum range of these little non-descript antennas. I keep a fairly detainles logbook too and I part of that log is RST information as well.

All of this information has been collected using QRP transmitter power of 5 watts or less to see how the other station can hear me and how many of those stations I can contact as well. To be honest, I was shocked at how good this little antenna works. It is fairly quiet (when you are not near man-made noise) and I can hear CW signals surprisingly well even on the tiny little Penntek TR-35 radio.

To get an idea of what you can do, just take a look at some of my recent AAR blogposts like Monte Sano State Park for instance. That one was done with the Penntek TR-35 and the 20 meter hamstick as well. Actually all of these recent activations have been with the lowly hamstick so far since it has gotten cold or rainy.

10 DEC POTA Activation map 20 meter hamstick and 5 watts of CW output in 30 minutes.

The above image shows what I was able to do with 5 watts and the 20 meter hamstick on a day when there was not quite so many amateurs on the air that could hear me either. I will check on some other hams and they will have tons of pile up activity and when I call CQ, it is quite different most of the time. I can occasionally get a small pile up going with just 5 watts, but I am not skilled at managing a pile up so I end up still working just about 1 per minute or maybe a little more than that. So I normally run about 1 per minute on a good day for the entirety of my activation and normally I don’t activate over 2 hours max, most of the time it is 1 hour or maybe a little less, so the maps wont be quite so buried, but they do show the effectiveness of the antenna anyway. The first QSO that day was to Puerto Rico and the longest was to California. Not bad for 5 watts and a tiny antenna!

I was going to try to come up with some sort of scientific way to measure the long range effectiveness but in the end, there just ins’t any way to do it. The only thing I have is this little map and that is a pretty good representation. You see if it is to be scientific, there has to be a control and there has to be non-subjective measurements and the test has to be repeatable. This last one is the real problem, the atmosphere changes constantly, this is why we have QSB,,, So we cant reproduce the test exactly with a different antenna since when we test the second one, it will have different atmospheric conditions. We can try, but there is no real way of knowing if the two antennas got tested with the same conditions… so it really is pointless to compare them to other antennas.

So to summarize… A hamstick antenna is a type of portable antenna commonly used by amateur radio operators. It consists of a flexible metal rod, or "stick," that is mounted on a base and can be easily taken down and transported.

The metal stick of the hamstick antenna is actually a type of coil called a loading coil. This coil is designed to resonate at a specific frequency, which is determined by the length of the coil and the type of wire used. When the hamstick antenna is connected to a radio transmitter or receiver, the radio's electrical signals are sent through the loading coil, which converts the signals into radio waves that can be transmitted or received.

One of the advantages of a hamstick antenna is that it is easy to set up and take down. It can be mounted on a car or other vehicle, or it can be placed on a tripod or other base. This makes it a popular choice for portable operation, such as field day events or emergency communication.

Another advantage of the hamstick antenna is that it is relatively inexpensive and requires minimal maintenance. It is a simple yet effective way to get on the air and make contacts with other amateur radio operators.

Overall, a hamstick antenna is a convenient and cost-effective way for amateur radio operators to communicate on the airwaves. It is a popular choice for portable operation and can be easily set up and taken down as needed.

So grab your hamstick and take to the airwaves and make some contacts!!!

David

WK4DS

72

Ten Tec Argonaut 5 goes to the park and then gets a new fan!

I love this radio, it works so well and is really easy to use with minimal menu settings. Then again I love all TenTec radios and have an unhealthy addiction to the brand…lol. Is it really that bad of a problem? I bought this one “for field use”, you know… like Field Day in June or POTA, but I have found things about it that keep me reaching for other radios most of the time. Let’s take a look at some of these short comings for a field radio that I like to use while doing an activation.

So I get this radio out much less for a couple of reasons… The main one is that it doesn’t have a CW keyer memories built in like the ICOM IC-705 and the Penntek TR-35 have in them. This is a big deal if you plan to activate for more than an hour or so as calling cq over and over manually can be strenuous to say the least with time. You see the keyer does something for me other than relieve me from having to pound out the CQ all the time, it BUYS me time. I am able to make log notes and fill in missing parts of the log while it is happily sending the CQ for me. This is a huge help after a quick string of QSOs and I am getting the times written down along with my usual log notes I like to make.

Quick rabbit to chase here… There is a few notable call signs for me on this page. K9IS is my first Hunter to get to 50 QSOs with me and KJ7DT has been showing up in my log more frequently lately too. The other call is the Canadian, just because he is DX…lol. Always cool to have those DX callsigns in the logbook. Now back to your regularly scheduled chat about the radio.

The next reason I don’t normally grab this radio is that it is fairly large compared to the other radios too. When I am operating in the truck, space is a valuable commodity and I am not able to spread all the gear around easily, if you will notice in the above photo I actually have the Argonaut balanced on my camera bag so it wont be in the way of logging… This actually worked out pretty well though and I think I will come up with something for the other radios to sit in the same area in the future, it was really convenient having the whole surface for my book and key.

The next reason is that the fan is crazy loud and runs non-stop even when I have it turned down to 5 watts for my QRP ops.

A little about the activation today is also in order. I went to K-2169 (my local park) and went to my quiet place at the top of the hill. As you can see, I had the place to myself as usual.

So I get parked, then start assembling the antenna and getting the coax into the cab of the truck when I notice that the cable adapter I have on the base of the antenna is loose, I am not sure how long it has been loose, but it was pretty loose today, to the point the BNC connector spun when I went to install it. This is how I found it was loose. Point here is check those screw together connections from time to time. They work loose too. The one on the back of the radio was loose too… which I thought was odd since I have only used it a couple of times so far.

Although today I didn’t need them, the BNC converter is a nice adapter to have in your kit. I could have used regular PL=259 connectors today, but I had forgot that the antenna and the radio both use them so I just used the same cable I use for the other radios and it worked great.

Another thing I have done is converted the power cable to use power-poles so I can plug it into any power source I use, which now also includes the power port in the truck too. I feel this is a worthwhile thing to do if you plan to work field ops a lot, standardization of the power connectors just makes sense.

I bought this case at the Huntsville Hamefest from Gigaparts and it is for some sort of military radio, but with a little cutting here and there and a little foam here and there it now houses the Argonaut 5 and a MFJ manual tuner as well as a wire antenna and some other miscellaneous items

Me and Roger (KG4WBI) have this obsession of printing out and binding all the owners manuals for all our radios. So I keep this one in the case with the radio and it was needed on this outing to see how to set a couple of menu items I had forgotten about.

Now for the Argonaut 5 Radio Fan…

The fan on this radio is just plain loud, that is the only way you can say it. It is also wired to run non-stop for some reason. This is also a pretty large current drain for no real reason at all other than to make absolutely certain the finals don’t get too hot… At some later point, I plan to make a small thermal sensing circuit that will fire a relay to cycle the fan instead of it just running all the time. but first things first, I am changing the fan itself with one of the low noise fans that another op from a TenTec group shared and it worked really well for them. I downloaded a sound meter app for my phone to see if it was measurable and have the two meter readings to see for myself. Ignore the AVG and MAX values, I watched the meter for a few minutes and did a screen capture of what was really going on to get a more representative number. 65 seems pretty low, but when you are listening for signals near the noise floor, every dB matters so the new fan comes in at 45(44.9 is what I captured in the screenshot and this was a pretty good average from what I watched on the meter.) Now also remember this is an iPhone app and not a legit sound meter, but it does give us something to look at for reference. If it is right, which is possible, then this is a 20dB difference. This is huge as decibels are logarithmic in nature and not linear, this is equal to 100 times quieter! That is awesome and totally worth the effort! To the ear, this new fan is dead silent, I didn’t think it was even running when I turned the radio on actually. So I am really pleased with how this mod turned out, the radio has one less detriment to keep me from using it at parks!

Old fan measured right at the back of the radio.

New fan measured in the same place as the old fan, that is a 20dB change!!!!

This was the ham shack with the Argonaut turned off for reference.

Orderd this little guy from amazon and had it in a couple of days.

This fan is literally a plug-n-play replacement for the factory fan in the radio. I literally removed the case screws, the fan screws, one wire tie on the wiring harness and unplugged the fan. It was the easiest mod I have ever done to a radio…ever.

Something of note, this new fan is thicker and the old screws would not work in my application, but I had a couple of screws in the junk drawer that were about 1/4” longer that worked great so I am back in the game!

The fan connector is a standard computer fan plug so it doesn’t need anything special at all. This is refreshing as it seems everybody wants to use proprietary connectors these days for some reason.

All in all, this has turned out to be a great little excursion in more than one way. I got the Argonaut on the air and I also got the fan upgraded afterwards too. I really like the ergonomics of the little machine so I will see how I can fit it into my regular activations and use it more now. Do you have a radio that you love, but just dont use because of some little issue? Let’s hear what it is and see if I am the only guy that does this.

72

David

WK4DS

K-2169 POTA Activation at the very foot of a MOUNTAIN - AAR

So the last two days have been really strange. I tried to activate K-2169 last night to see if I could pull off a late shift activation and it was a miserable failure, zero contacts in 30 minutes straight of sending CQ, literally no replies at all.

The night before when I literally got zero contacts.

I actually swapped out the radio for a spare (the IC-705), it showed activity in the waterfall but no one was able to hear me. I was on top of the mountain at this point too. So I packed up and came back home having had zero luck. You win some, you lose some…

The next day was different though. I only had about an hour to setup, activate and breakdown as we had “family activities” to do later. So I figured this was the chance to test another location I had been looking at for awhile now. The Sitton’s Gulch Trail Head is at the bottom of the canyon and the parking lot is literally buttressed against the bottom of the mountain proper.

To compound the problems, I didn’t want to put my radials out in the way of others if they wanted to park next to me as this lot tends to fill up pretty quick in nice weather. So I ran them both off to the drivers side of the truck to keep them out of the way.

Welcome to the literal foot of Lookout mountain.

One of the counter poise radials is actually draped over the corner of the truck but it didn’t seem to cause a problem with propagation from what I can tell. The mountain is on the south side of the parking lot proper so I figured I wouldn’t hear anything to the south at all, but I was surprised to see the map showing some stations on the dark side of the operation position, these guys must have incredible stations to hear my QRP signal into a compromised antenna with a literal mountain blocking our signals! My hat goes off to these guys!

The bulk of the contacts are from a predictable direction though, since Lookout mtn is part of the Appalachian mountain chain, most of the contacts are to the north east which is the direction that is clear of the mountain. It has a decent clearing to the west as well from this location as Sand mtn is about 2 miles away and it is fairly short too, only about 700 feet tall, so I was able to get out to Kansas and Minnesota pretty easy too. As you can see in the photos, I am in the forest surrounded by trees too, so I am happy with my little activation considering all the limitations imposed on it today.

The radio for today’s adventure is the Penntek TR-35 and the more I use it, the better I like it. The RIT is for CW sidetone adjustment. This was a trick I found in a forum post and thought it was really clever. If the other station is low on tone, turn the RIT down till they sound like you want, if they are high turn it up till they sound good to you, it works REALLY well and I wished I could remember the HAM that gave me this idea as I would credit them with it…if they do I will edit the post and add it here. I am running 5 watts on 20 meters today because I am using the “Truck-tenna” for the sake of time.

When I got on the air to start with, I was the only POTA station on 20 meters, and there was only one other when I went QRT an half hour later. The band was open too as the RBN (Reverse Beacon Network) was spotting me regularly.

Those are not outhouses in the photo. This area is home to a local cave system called Case Cave and those are changing rooms for the cavers when they come out of the cave. It is a really huge cave system and if you want to explore it, you need to contact the park and line up a time when someone with the key, will meet you and open it for you, it is locked to protect the uninitiated from getting themselves killed…

I am pretty sure I have not shown the counter poise weights on the wires really well yet. This is a simple system that works super well for keeping the radials extended and not having to drive in stakes to do it, I simply straighten the wire at the end when it is taught and walk away, it is that simple, the wire keeper is simply a piece of plastic with three holes drilled in it to thread the speaker wire through, it doesn’t slip at all. The weights run about 2 pounds or so and that seems to be plenty to keep a 16’ radial in place so far. I have not tried heavy winds yet, so the jury is out on that one.

Not sure what is going on here, this is the hiking trail and just below the camera is a huge gate across the road… lol. I thought it was funny with the irony of it being in a spot where you literally cant park. Maybe it is from a time when you could drive up the trail to the cave? I don’t know…

If you enjoy the blog I would appreciate a like and a comment if you have one. Thank you for your time and get out there and warm up the ionosphere!

72

David

WK4DS

Monte Sano State Park POTA Activation AAR with a 20m Hamstick

Well, I finally activated a park in a new state… Alabama. You might think this is normal, till you google my address and see that I live on the Alabama state line in Georgia! I am literally two minutes by car from the state line and it took me several months to activate a park in Alabama… Anyway, I decided to activate the [sarcasm]remote and rarely visited[/sarcasm] Monte Sano State Park K-1048!!! Woohoo! Well. it is neither rare nor remote actually being literally minutes outside of Huntsville AL. It was new for me so I packed up the TR-35 and the new 20m Hamstick setup and struck out for Huntsville.

As fate would have it, I had business meetings that were on a time table so I didnt have a long time to stay, I thought once again that if I get my ten contacts I will be happy, well…I got more.

This is the QSO map from this trip. The VERY FIRST contact was with France!!! I thought, this is going to be a good day. Any day that my 5 watts reaches across the Atlantic Ocean, is a good day for me. It is obvious that the band and take off angle of my antenna dictate a certain “minimum” distance that people can hear me. A quick look at the map shows this, but just outside of this region and all bets are off! They piled in and in just over an hour I had 43 contacts in the log, with one being a dupe… It never ceases to amaze me at how well these little radios can perform with some thought and patience, but today the whole patience thing was out the window!!! I just kept getting calls! It was a QRP dream activation, I just wished I had been able to stay longer to see how many more I could have worked… Seems here lately, I am only able to stay and hour or two at best, I hope to remedy this soon, but for now, I will take that!!!

I also worked CU3AA in the Azores and VE2WLD (who also performed double duty as a Park to Park as well) for three DX stations on this trip alone! That is awesome and makes the whole activation just that much more special to me. If you have not ever tried POTA, I would recommend it at least once, it might not be for you, but if you enjoy setting up for field day, then you will probably like this. It is similar, but much more relaxed and lower key… At least that is how I see it. I find myself getting on the air more as a hunter and as an activation now that I have activated. It is just plain fun to go to a park and operated with a battery for a while and answer the passerby question from time to time. Once again, you can see the band opening and closing like waves on the ocean (maybe more like the tide coming in as it is slower than waves breaking on the beach) in the signal reports in the log. I even had a couple of people tell me they had problems with QSB (fading of the signal) towards the end of the activation.

Also of note is that this park has a day use fee (see below), be prepared for it when you get there, they have an attendant at the entrance to collect this fee before you enter the park. Parks seem to have a lot of lattitube in how they collect these fees, I have seen honor system pay boxes as well as no fees at all (Booker T Washington in Chattanooga TN has no fee) and then places like Monte Sano where they collect the fee at the entrance to the park. Cloudland has the honor system boxes as well as a attendant that works at the entrance part time, so you might find a person at the entrance and you might not, it is kind of a crap shoot with this one. You just never know… What I do know is the fee structure is normally really reasonable and to be honest…cheap for what you get. I bought my Georgia park pass back after my first activation and now that I am 47 activations in, that cost average is almost down to 1$ per visit. Once I break 50 it will be less than 1$ per trip. That is a smokin deal if you will be doing POTA ops regulaly at your local state parks (and they offer an annual pass like this one in Georgia). I plan to get over 100 activations at Cloudland before I have to renew my pass next May so then the daily cost should hit 50 cents per visit. Where else can you get a deal that good?

This is the only thing I brought back from that trip aside from my logbook, I don’t know how I forgot to get photos of the setup for you guys…I straight dropped the ball on that one. I guess it means I get to go back at some point so I can properly photograph it. LOL

The Penntek TR-35 is really starting to grow on me. This little radio just plain works. It doesn’t have things like a waterfall display or QSO recording like my IC-705 but what is does have is pretty much CW perfection. I have every control I normally use when doing an activation, at my fingertips and not buried in a sub menu or an alternate function for commonly used features…like CW speed control is a dedicated knob, this is super handy as POTA hunters vary in speed a good bit so being able to slow down on the fly for a slower op and then speed back up for a faster one is really handy. It is being tested out for a potential trip to Central America in a few months so I hope to keep up on using it and to prove it out as a capable machine while I am south of the border.

All in all it was a great trip and I finally got to activate Alabama too! If you have not used CW and want to, there are lots of ways to learn this historical mode fairly easily. It isn’t for everyone, just like SSTV isn’t for everyone, so if you don’t like CW it is all good, that is why we have different modes, at least in my mind it is, lol. If you have not done it yet, please like this blog and subscribe for future posts, Till next time, get your radio out and make some contacts!