Counterpoise testing during a POTA Activation

Today involved some experimentation as well as a POTA activation. I tested some changes to the radials I use on my hamstick system out of curiosity and came away with some interesting results. Read on to see the AAR and the results of this test.

Today was supposed to be a quick little activation and then I was going to do a few other things, but plans are made to be changed from what I can tell as the bands were doing well for me and I stayed longer than I planned. But then the sun can bring that full circle as you will see below.

The operating position today shown above, was on top of the hill at the frisbee golf course and on the bed cover of the truck. Turns out that was somewhat of a bad idea. It just got hotter as the day progressed and the sun quickly came over the door I was using to shade me. This is what ultimately caused me to go QRT when I did as I was having a decent run on 20 meters at the time. It was just plain hot, with the sun seemingly cooking my right ear while I was working ops. I did enjoy working several ops today I have seen in my log before plus some that I have not. I even got a Canadian which is always nice.

This is probably the best image of my 40m hamstick and mount I have ever gotten. With the sun in the right spot, the whole antenna lit up well enough for the camera to get it. The setup is not actually mobile as it requires a counter poise to get it to work it’s best, but wow… it worked really well today, especially well today actually for some reason. I can hear surprisingly well on these tiny HF antennas too. I own three different brands of hamsticks (covering 40, 30, 20, 17 and 15) and can not tell a difference in any of them as far as how well they work. They all just work really well.

These two photos tell a story about what was happening at the location today on 30 meters. When people talk about having RF noise at a location, this is what it looks like on a radio that doesn’t have a waterfall display. The photo above is what the noise floor looked like when the RF noise was not present and the bottom image is what it looked like when it started up. It also was not constant, but appeared to by cyclic in nature as it would spool up and would just be some sort of hash for about 20 seconds and then it would just go away for about 30 seconds maybe longer. I would be able to work one contact and then it would come back and if the hunters were not transmitting with an S9 signal, I couldn’t hear them. This is really frustrating and is one of the reasons I don’t activate 30 meters more than I do. But so it life and how much fun would it be if we never had problems to solve? It would get pretty boring pretty fast… Even with this RF hash coming in and out, I was still able to get 9 calls in the log on 30 meters today so I count that as a win anyway.

The next thing I want to share about today has to do with the antenna system I was using. I have made tuned radials for all of my hamstick except the 15 meter unit (I have not deployed it yet, but soon I will.) I went to a lot of trouble to tune these radials too, with a ton of time at home working on this. Well, it turns out that I didn’t need to do that for the 30 meter hamstick at all. I deployed my nanoVNA today and did some measurements on the hamsticks to confirm nothing has changed with them and figured out something just out of curiosity. Seems that the radials for 40 & 20 meters work just fine on 30 meters too. This means one set of radials for all three of those hamsticks. Next outing I will take the 17 and 15 meter hamsticks and tune them up and see if the same radials will work on them too…fingers crossed. I am always looking for ways to simplify my station setup and the radials has been one of the slowest things to deploy of all the gear for POTA with the hamsticks. So if I can get it down to just the two radials and not having to remember the color codes for them and such I will count that as another win in my book.

The above photo shows that the antenna is fine on the 20 meter CW section, even though it is technically low on the best part of the chart, it is only 1.188:1 where I normally work on the 20 meter band. Well, knowing that, below is what it looks like on 30 meters with the 40/20 meter radials instead of the tuned radials I made up for just for the 30 meter band. Pretty crazy huh? Looks almost identical to the 20 meter chart and even almost matches the 20 meter SWR value. I was blown away by how good this turned out and to think I have never even tried it before today… Another thing I noticed about hamsticks in general is that they act like bandpass filters across the HF spectrum, I did open up the range on the nanoVNA and it does have other nulls IN THE VHF SPACE, but each hamstick has ONLY ONE spot they are resonant at in the 0 - 30mhz spectrum. No multiple harmonics like the EFHW, just one really deep SWR null is all you get. So plan accordingly, but to be honest, it works really well so I am not going to complain. I think this might actually work as a band pass filter but have not had the chance to test it yet. Maybe I will set this up at winter field day and see what it sounds like there. That should do it.

Here is the log from this activation and the signal reports look good for a mismatched antenna on the trailer hitch of my truck. I was using 15 watts though so that might have helped some. I have been sending with more power lately to just play with the Argonaut to see how hot the heat sink gets at various power levels and on CW it barely gets warm at all with 15 watts of RF so I am really happy with that. I am doing this test since i changes the fan a while back to reduce the fan noise as the factory fan is quite loud. I have a blog post showing what I did with this if you are interested in that.

All in all I learned something new and had a great activation at the same time. So till next time go get your radio out and make some contacts on it!

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

A couple of quick activations testing the antennas

The past couple of days have been busy and there was still time for a couple of quick activations along the way.

First stop is the Estelle Trailhead on Crockford Pigeon Mtn WMA (K-3742) over in LaFayette GA while coming home from visiting with my mom. This is actually a new park for me even though it is only 15 miles from home by road… I dont know why, but I have never activated it for some reason. The Estelle parking area is fully within the WMA boundary so it was a simple matter to pull in, get parked out of the road and setup a radio in the shade for a little while. Today saw the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 again as this radio was the one in the truck at the time. It is also one of my favorite HF radios at this point. It only lacks two things to be the perfect radio, an SWR meter and an internal antenna tuner…but I digress.

I said that I setup in the shade, but there really wasn’t much to start with…lol. I did get lucky and a nice cloud moved in after a few minutes and helped keep things cool. I don’t like to let my radios just sit and cook in the sun if I can help it and will go to fairly great lengths to prevent them from getting hot. This is what you see here. The shade was just wide enough to protect most of the radio from direct sun so it didn’t get very hot before the clouds moved in. On top of that the tool bag is shading my battery in this photo too, I didn’t want it to get too hot either…haha.

I started on 15 meters today as I finally have a 15 meter capable radio and antenna too! Well the RBN showed 29dB for me! That is crazy good for someone with 15 watts under their belt into “7” land. But try as I may, there just wasnt that many hunters on 15 meters for some reason. I did get 3 QSOs in the log while on 15 meters so all was not lost. Then I moved down to 17 meters and did quite well there, picking up several more contacts. Then I finished out the activation on 20 meters which is my backup if I need to get my 10 for the activation. 20 never seems to let me down either as I can almost garuntee at least a few contacts there.

So after getting the activation, I wanted to experiment with the antenna system and see how it would work on the drive home. Turns out the 20 meter hamstick without radials has worse SWR than with them, going from 1.15:1 up to 1.7:1. Who would have guessed? LOL. This is not a real problem though as this is still well below what I consider useable SWR. As long as I can stay below 2.5:1 I will operate. That is the upper limit though and I will work on the antenna a good bit to get it down but if nothing helps and I have 2.5:1 SWR, I will try it. The radios can handle anything below 3:1 so I set my personal threshold below that… I know some people wont use their gear if isn’t almost perfectly 1:1, but I have come to realize that it isn’t so important and the signal reports speak for themselves.

On the drive home, I start hearing this REALLY strong signal booming in to the Argonaut 5. The above photo shows what the signal level coming into the radio was 20 over S9, and remember that the Argonaut 5 has a S meter that doesn’t like to give out good signal reports. So I start working on head copy on the drive and finally get that it is W1AW/0 in Colorado and he (or she) is working as a POTA park! So I do what any sane POTA hunter would do, I pull over at the New Salem Firehall and work them mobile! WK4DS/M got into their log!!! WooHoo!!! So at the bottom of the logbook page you will see where I logged the hunter contacts on this trip since I was not at a park when I made these contacts.

New Salem Firehall parking lot was empty and worked great for getting my hunter contact on the drive home.

As a side note, I finally made the hitch pin (shown below) for my antenna mount so I can use it for the rover program without having to pull it off the truck and stow it between parks. I am working on reducing the setup and breakdown time at each park as I am going to attempt a 10 park rove and this will take planning to make it happen. Things like this can add up on the rove to make it take too long since the drive time from one park to the next will be the biggest time eater of the day. So if I can find simple little things that I can do on each stop to save time, I can make the most of the activation.

I made the main pin that holds the mount, but I simply bought the little pin to lock it in place. Sometimes it is smarter to buy a part rather than spend the time to make it. The main pin was easy enough to make from scrap shafting material. but to make the keeper pin would have taken more than the 3$ it cost in time so I opted to simply buy it instead. To be honest, it would have probably been smarter to buy the main pin too, but I had a scrap piece of round and time available on the lathe so I just carved one out right quick rather than drive to the store to buy one. Another plus is that I could make it like I wanted which included adding the handle to the main side so it is easier to pull when breaking down the system. On top of the pin making, I also opted to add an extra set of holes to the antenna mount so that the pin can be left in for simple POTA activation days where I dont have to pull the pin to simply setup for a single park. This allows me to just stick the mount in the hitch and use it like I have been and take it down when done so I can stow it inside the truck bed when not in use.

The next park I went to a couple of days later is the Chickamauga National Military Park. K-0716. This park lies in two states, so today I opted to activate the Tennessee side of the park. This location is easy to access as it is literally on the side of the road. This is why I like this location and hate it at the same time. The location is called Eagles Nest and is part of the military park completely within the park boundary.

K-0716 presents me with a quandary. This “shack” position makes for a comfortable operating position but the road noise is really bad due to the proximity to the road… I have used headphones here before and that seems like the correct thing to do if I operate here much more. I am going to go ahead and get my repeat offender for activating this park. I am already half way to this award anyway so why not? Ha Ha… Another thing that surprises me is that there are some fairly large trucks to travel up this narrow and winding road to the top of the mountain. Like large d4livery trucks kind of large, I guess it is normal, but it just kind of caught me off guard to see such large trucks going by while I was there.

The radial situation is unique here too, since it is on the shoulder of the road, I have to put both radials on the same side of the truck. Whenever I do this, I always get out the nanoVNA to see what this has done to the SWR plot. As usual, it did affect it but not by much. I was surprised to see that on 15 meters it needed both radials to get a decent SWR before I was happy. So I get it setup, spot myself, start a log in HAMRS and start calling CQ. I finally net a couple of contacts on 15 meters, but there are not many hunters even though the band was open. It did have some fading, but it was fairly strong anyway and could easily support use, but people were not there. So I moved down to 17 meters. Once on 17 meters the RBN (Reverse Beacon Network) picked me up and showed the strongest signal report I have ever seen for one of my activations. 42dB is insane! I have never seen that and this was with 15 watts no less. So people MUST be on this band, right? Well no, it seems that all the people on HF were down on 20 meters having a grand old time without the few of us up on 17 meters. I added 4 more QSOs to the log with one being KJ7DT who followed me down the bands working me on all three on this day. To me this is awesome as it shows the propagation for all three bands was really good as he is in Idaho which is almost 1800 miles from me.

So I finally decide to join in on the fun on 20 meters and QSY down with what seemed like the rest of planet earth and secured the activation in short order. Getting Paul - KJ7DT a third time on this day and Keith WI0S twice! Both of these calls have appeared in my log on numerous occasions. These are some very prolific hunters and I just want to thank them for being there to hunt like they do. They are what make activating parks fun. With 13 calls in the log I officially had the activation so I packed up as it was getting close to lunch and the road noise made it very hard to hear as well and headed into Chattanooga to go have lunch with the girls.

The clip board has made a huge difference in operating ease for me. I can now not worry about the wind turning the pages and it gives me a hard surface to work from no matter where I am. This alone helps a ton. As seen here, I am able to lay the keyer and the key on it as well as log. If you still paper log this is a very handy addition to the POTA kit in my book. Yes, I still paper log. I have had too many computers where they crash unexpectant and you have to reboot the machine and wait for it to get back up and running to trust it with my only log of an activation. The paper notebook gives me a durable backup to my phone logbook that I run at the same time.

Side note about how I log… I will run HAMRS in parallel to my paper logs and if the activation is going kinda slow, I can log both at once and keep the electronic log caught up in real time. This is a recent thing brought on by me wanting to not have to set aside time at home just to transcribe the log so I can submit it online. I found that a lot of my activations are slow enough to permit time to log the QSOs while I work the activation and not have to do it at home. So if things speed up and I cant log both the paper and electronic, then I always default to paper and the battery never goes dead in paper logs nor does the app crash… Then when things slow down, I will let the keyer send CQs and I will catch up the electronic log while I am calling so I don’t waste that time just sitting there waiting on an answer. This works really well and I can normally email the log from the park before I leave so when I get home I can simply upload them to the POTA site since it wont let me upload from my phone yet…

Here is something else that a lot of people that don’t do field ops have no idea about. A carrier with a bunch of backup equipment is a must. Everything in this bag has been used on an activation in the last few months in one way or the other. Notice there is power cords and spare coax and three pens are visible on the side, this is something that you quickly learn, things break, pens dry out, you run out of paper, all of this is things you have to prepare for before going to the park and the only way you learn this is from doing it. I can preach to the ends of time but until you have to end your activation because your coax connector came off or the center conductor broke on the coax or your antenna mount breaks, you wont prepare for it as a contingency. That is just how it is…Another really handy tool to have is a Leatherman multitool of some kind, brand isn’t important, what matters is that you have one, I don’t know how many times I have used mine to save the activation some how. Totally worth the price of admission in my book.

QSO maps are awesome, I have KJ7DT in the log on all three bands today so his one pin is actually three. Just like I have WI0S in the log twice so his pin represents two contacts. This is neat to see though as you get a visual idea of what the bands were like on this day. If I studied space weather more then I would be able to corelate the data so that it would be more meaningful, but like this it really doesn’t tell much other than skip distance for the bands I used. That is about it but it is still fun to look at them nonetheless.

So this is what it looks like to activate two parks on two different days and how the setups vary for each one based on the conditions for each location. Next time I will carry headphones for the one by the road so I can hear better. Till then, get your radio out and make some contacts with it!!!!

Overcast POTA activation strikes gold!

So today was a good day for POTA. I did some small work related items, grabbed the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and headed to Cloudland to get an activation in before lunch. Before I even setup on frequency I was dial-ing around on 17 meters to check the band and found G3VBS calling CQ with no takers! So I figure, why not see if he can hear me… turns out 20 watts was plenty to make a contact with England and we had a great chat for quite a few minutes with only a little QSB.

Today I setup at the frisbee golf course parking area as it is the highest part of the park as well as the quietest RF wise. The lower lot has a nicer view but with the proximity to the campground and so many more people in general, it tends to be noisy comparatively.

Something else I like about the upper lot is I can either deploy the setup in the photo above or I can string a wire in a tree as well. Rigging the hamsticks in the lower lot is more difficult to say the least. So I was a little worried about the impending rain that was on the radar, I normally use the setup you see as I can sit in the truck and operate even in the rain. This is really nice as even inclement weather cant stop my POTA activations! Haha.

Well sure enough when I got home, it started raining so I made a good call here.

I did setup on the bed cover though, which is a little exposed but I figured I could move it into the truck pretty fast should it start to rain.

Today’s radio is the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 which is a wonderful little portable HF transceiver. It is larger than the TR-35 but it also has multiple modes and has every HF band available as well. Today I started on 17 meters because… why not? And that is where I heard G3VBS. I figured I would secure the activation with ease after having a great QSO with the UK. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. I only made one more contact on 17 before giving up and moving to 20 meters. Once on 20 meters things started to pick up for me.

There were a couple of pretty strong pile ups at times and it was fairly difficult to dig out a sinlge call. Mainly because most of the stations were zero beat with me. This makes all the signals turn into one large tone and I get garbled info. Luckily, I have learned a couple of tricks around this and can work with most people now. I will simple call W? Or if I get part of a Canadian call, VE? You get the point. This is a tried and true trick of pile up runners (did I just make up a new term? LOL) around the world. When you cant make out anything, just ask for the most common prefix you know and someone will reply. It worked well for me today as I was able to break apart the pile up and get every one into the log that I could hear. I even worked 4 or 5 stations after calling QRT as they were asking and I had time. I ended up with 36 QSOs toward my day as I had one dupe so it was a great day for POTA. If you want to know more about POTA just give it a google search and head over to their website. Until later, 73 de WK4DS

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

15 meter POTA activation with DX!

Today I went to K-2169 (Cloudland Canyon State Park) and setup my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and proceeded to work 15 meters with the intent to not get on 20 meters at all. (I did wander down to 17 meters but not till I had secured the activation on 15 meters first.) I just enjoy the pursuit of the higher bands for some reason. I really like to work 15 meters in particular and I have no good reason why either… I pulled the wire up into a tree in an almost vertical orientation but it could still be called a sloper if you held you head right. Probably a 60 degree angle sloper, but it was up in the tree and the 13’ counter poise was 90 degrees to it.

The view from my operating position never gets old. I love activating this park with the view and the tree canopy giving almost perpetual shade it makes for a wonderful location almost all year round.

This is the view directly behind me. There was a fairly lively family reunion or some such happening in this shelter. I had to turn up the volume a couple of times to be able to hear over them. LOL. This is also one of the reasons I like the location I am at, should it start to rain, I can just unhook the antenna wire and battery and basically carry the radio and tuner to the shelter in just seconds.

Once again, the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 was front and center. I have really grow to love this little radio. I can see why they have such a cult following, the receiver is great, the filters are simple to use and effective, the radio has minimal menu options that mainly follow the “set n forget” ideology, What’s not to love for a CW op? I think going forward this will be my main POTA radio for ops where I am near the truck and I will use the Penntek TR-35 for backpack ops due to its small size.

Another thing I did today was bring one of my large keys, this one has been out of the house several times already so it is no stranger to a picnic table. It is my prototype CW key I made many years ago, it works wonderfully too. I actually use it more than the newer model I made later that is still on the bench connected to the Omni 6+…

I am also using the HamGadgets keyer I picked up off of eBay a while back. This little keyer is the reason I now like using the Argonaut 5 on activations. The Argonaut doesn’t have memories in the keyer, so you have to pound out every bit of the code you send with it. This allows me to record some messages like my CQ and such so I can just hit a button and send the whole call for POTA.

Here we have something that a lot of people gloss over. Fuses. Also note that I have the battery connected to the input fuse and I deliberately chose the 10 amp fuse for the Argonaut since it is only 20 watts out. I need to take my inline meter and see what the draw is on dead key and adjust accordingly but for now I know the battery and radio are fuse protected like this. Don’t neglect to add fuses to your portable system, it still matters as much as at home. This is not a name brand fuse bank either which means I wont load it as heavy as they advertise, we all know these are built to the edge of spec anyway.

I wanted to show the case I transport the radio in. This is some sort of surplus military case that we picked up as Huntsville Hamfest last year for really reasonable money. A little cutting here and there and some new closed cell foam and contact adhesive and we have a case to carry the Argonaut 5 and a MFJ antenna tuner with a wire antenna connection input on it as well. You can see the tuner still in the case as I was using my Ten Tec tuner today since it was in the box with the antenna.

Well, I got on the air today on 15 meters and heard a good bit of band activity and so I figured I would check the POTA spots to see who all was on 15…turns out I was the only one on 15 meters on the spot page. I didn’t check it after that for a while but when I did there still wasn’t anyone other than me that was there. I don’t know why other than the QSB (fading) that was happening. You can see the timestamps in my log where I would go 3 or 4 four minutes without so much as a call and then I would get several in a row. You can also see from the signal reports that when they did come in, they came in strong! As I was working through a tiny pile up with NK8O and VE3CT I could hear a weak station near the noise. Once I cleared the other two stations I could hear YS1MS coming out a little louder now! I was stoked to get central America in the log today! Yeah, I know the Oregon call was probably further away, but I got a DX call in the log from El Salvador today!!! WooHoo! When 15 is open is goes WAY out there! KJ7DT came booming in to me right off the bat. Man I love this hobby!

So it seemed that 15 meters started to close or something as I went several minutes without a call so I decided to tune up on 17 meters and see what I could scratch up. Well, 17 did not disappoint. I worked several stations fairly quickly and I could tell that I was on a lower band than before as the station that was coming in loud on 15 that was kind of near me (N2DI) was weaker on 17 meters. I actually worked several hams on both bands today, which is always awesome. But I did notice several hams from out west were on 17 but not 15 meters. You will notice two Idaho stations, two Utah stations and a Arizona station. It was almost like the signal on 15 hopped right over these guys or they don’t have a 15 meter antenna…who knows to be honest. Anyway at about 21:43 UTC I hit a little pileup of 3 or 4 stations and once again started pulling the callsigns out one at a time. I kept hearing this station down near the noise, but it was solid, just the other stations were a lot louder and I could copy them easier so I went ahead and worked them out. Then I started pulling out the call. I got the number right away, it was a 1 and I knew I had heard the CC at the end…what was that first letter again? W? No, that isn’t right. “UR CALL?” J… It was a J callsign!!! I have never worked a Japan call before, I have never honestly heard a Japan ham loud enough to be able to make a QSO with them, I have heard them before but they were down in the noise. This one was weak, but clearly I could hear the call. J…H…1…O…C…C… YES, it was Japan!!! I couldn’t believe it when he gave me a 539 with my compromise antenna and 20 watts of power! I was on cloud nine for a few minutes after this. I even bragged to my buddies about it. It was a great day today. I had hoped to work a few J calls while I was in Hawaii, but never heard one while I was there. That is just how it goes…lol.

I ended up with 29 QSOs in the log today which is a great day as it means I secured the activation as I worked several DX stations to boot. What is your favorite DX station you have worked while operation portable or picnic table mobile or some such?

73 WK4DS

222mhz Repeater upgrades for better reliability.

When KG4WBI decides to do something, he does it right. So we finally got a stable repeater operating at the repeater site. It has a little bit of a hot receiver, but it is working so we are not complaining.

Above you can see the new and improved KG4WBI 1.25m repeater in operation! This system works like a charm and we have been happily giving it a good work out ever since he built this out.

Up till recently we have been using an old GE Master II (2 meter repeater) that has been retuned to work on 1.25 meters. This was apparently no small feat either as there were extensive notes about what had to be done and all the new information was written out meticulously. This was nice as we soon ran into a problem with it due to the old solder joints and corroded connectors were making it have a plethora of problems. We would chase one down and get it fixed only to find another one a day or two later. What clued us in that we had a good location for the repeater though was that we had found out that we had been talking on the repeater with the finals shut down so it was literally transmitting with the preamp, we found it in the manual and it was something like 90mW if I remember right. I can be wrong here, but that is what I think it was… needless to say it wasn’t much, and were able to ragchew on it and have a great time for the most part. So the tuned repeater antenna up 50 feet above the grade on the brow of the mountain was an excellent location.

Here you have yours truly putting the coax on the wall with plastic “one hole” style tie downs. We wanted to do this so that it wouldn’t risk crushing the coax as we tighten it down.

Well the preamp finally went out too and we actually had to shut the repeater down for a while till we could go work on it. So we get a day and go trouble shoot on it a while and the problem comes and goes while we are there looking at it and the silly thing even juiced up the PA for a few minutes to full output while were testing into a dummy load. Then it all went out again and there was nothing we could do without an oscilloscope to check for signal. At this point we shut it back off and go home to look at oscilloscopes to see what we could find that would work up to 250mhz…

In the mean time, Roger gets out a couple of mobile 222 radios he has and orders a Hamgadgets repeater controller off the interwebs. He then proceeds to build a working repeater out of these two radios with only a couple of slight modifications and just goes to the site and temporarily connects them to the existing duplexer and powers the system on. It takes him a few minutes to get a few of the settings right and BAM! The KG4WBI 1.25m repeater is back on the air! These radios work surprisingly well too. We ran it like that for a few weeks with the radios laying on a 5 gallon bucket if memory serves. Well, once we figure out that these radios work fine in this role, we decided to make the install a little more permanent and get all the repeater parts out of his son’s way so he can work on cars again… lol. You see, his son wants his garage back so he can tinker on project cars…

The antenna is sitting on top of a 48’ push up pole that we guyed too to the site once we got it raised just to eliminate any chance of wind blowing it over. The power supply below was chosen for the main power supply should we choose to run it on mains again directly at some point. So this is here for that expansion should we choose to do it.

Instead we chose the route below. We have a 10 amp smart battery charger wired to these batteries and since we are only running 25 watts, the whole thing only draw about 7 or 8 amps on transmit. I want to say we tested it and measured right at 7 amps on transmit, but this means that if the power fails for any reason, this repeater will not miss a beat for many hours. something on the order of 30 straight hours of transmit… Which means in reality it will last 2 or three days of casual use before the batteries expire. By then we will have been able to take some solar cells to the site or even a small generator should we want it to stay online past that. Most power outages for us in this area will last less than one full day so this means we should never have the repeater go offline for power failure 99% of the time.

As you can see above, Roger also installed a copious amount of these RFI chokes on the power wires everywhere! These work reasonably well and are really easy to install so there isn’t really a reason not to take the precaution and use a few of them. We were hoping to suppress and RFI coming out of the smart charger and as far as we can tell, either the charger has good radio noise suppression or these chokes did the trick…or a combination thereof.

Below you can see one of Roger’s experiments. This is part of the “if one is good then two is better” plan. He is testing how clean the skirts are with the smaller duplexer wired in series with the larger one. It has incredible sensitivity on receive without even a hint of the transmitter RF in it. I think this actually worked… Out of this duplexer you see the coax going into the lightening protector which is grounded with that huge ground wire you see in the photo. The coax then comes out of the lightening arrestor and heads out to the antenna with LMR 400 DB.

I just wanted to share something about ham radio that wasn’t a POTA activation for a change… lol. Thanks for reading along and 73

WK4DS - David

2023 Huntsville Hamfest from the view of a vendor this time!!!

Man time flies! It has already been a year since me and Trey had come over and bought all those military surplus cases and stuff! I cant understand how that has happened…

Anyway, I signed up for a table in the “bone yard” which is indoors at Huntsville, which is nice since it means it is out of the direct sun in August and has air conditioning. Well Trey arrives the day of the event and I already have my stuff int he truck, we just load a couple things he is bringing and we are off.

Side notes: Check out the vintage Ten Tec t-shirt I only get out for this and sometimes Field Day, I am probably the only person alive who still has one. I am also monitoring two ham bands here, our 2 meter simplex frequency and our 1.25 meter simplex frequency, We used both over the course of the day to make contact with friends. Back to the story already in progress…

We get to the convention center right on time and find a huge line of cars waiting to get into the show area. Once we work our way through the line we figure out these people are parking in the underground parking lot and we need to go to the back to unload the truck, well we get out of line, unload the truck and setup in short order. I can tell already it is going to be a good show for me when I can’t even get the truck parked before Trey (who went with the stuff to the table) is already being pummeled by dealers wanting to buy my stuff! This is a good sign!

By the time this photo was taken, the Icom IC 705 and tuner were sold. It literally lasted 5 minutes. this is good as the proceeds from the sale of this radio went to purchase the sBitx radio that I want for POTA instead. I had also already sold one of the two power supplies I took over as well. Common items seem to have went really fast to be honest.

Here, Trey (KG4WBI) Is getting settled in for the long arduous day of minding the table. Also, at this point I still had the Elecraft K1 pictured here as well. More on this radio later.

Once the doors opened, it was a free for all till about lunch time. It was REALLY crowded with so many people that it was hard to imagine the total number of participants. Everybody seemed to have a radio, even the little kids!

Things moved off of the table steadily all morning though and I had high hopes that I would actually achieve my goal of not taking any of it home with me! Each little item, one by one, would get picked up and bought by some enterprising person looking for the find of the day. I was happy to help them too.

After lunch I made my way over to the POTA table and grabbed a photo for the blog, they were pretty busy so I didn’t bother them with my shenanigans but left them to inform the youth about the wonders of ham radio. While out on my stroll I did check on a couple of items I was looking for and stopped to play with the N3ZN keys for a minute as they are SWEEEEET! Then it was back to the grind of tending “shop”…

I continued to see the stuff I didn’t use goto new homes one at a time till I was down to the K1, the Ten Tec 238 tuner and the Comet Antenna Analyzer. Then the strangest thing happened. I had to goto the bathroom. Well, that wasnt really all that odd, but what was happening at the table was. Turns out Josh from Ham Radio Crash Course had sent out scouts looking for a K1 or a K2 and they found mine and told him. He was livestreaming the event too! Well, he finds the table and makes his way over to it to find Trey minding the booth in my absence. You can actually watch his stream and see the whole thing transpire, just fast forward to about the 18 minute mark to see where it all starts.

Ham Radio Crash Course Video

A little back story here. I love the little K1, it was a favorite of mine for many years and I have used it off and on for that time. I just took a long hard look at the gear in the shack and realized the K1 sits on a shelf WAY more than not and I needed it to goto a good home where it would see more air time. So with a little sadness, I packed it up to goto the hamfest to find a new home. I get attached to things like this way to much and this is an exercise in decluttering my life, I wanted to move out a ton of gear and not just throw it away or such but turn it into something I would use instead. The K1 is just a plain fun radio to use, hence the pain in seeing it leave. I believe Josh will do a wonderful job at this and look forward to seeing the little K1 on his youtube channel soon.

It was great interacting with him and getting to chat for a minute, he took it straight way over to the test bench and had them check it for operation and he was happy it worked as advertised, All of this is also in the livestream…lol.

Then I had one more trek around a little to pick up a few items I have been looking for and actually found. I got a coax and some connectors from the Wire Man, I got the drop-in desk charger for my old Icom HT I have been using lately and it even came with a working radio! So now I have two!!! HAHA, why did I come to the hamfest again??? Then I bought a cable from another cable builder, ABR Industries, and I must say they look really good, I wanted a new coax for my POTA work and he builds his with common mode chokes built into the cable, that is really nice and i am looking forward to testing this cable on the nanoVNA to see how it compares to my homebrew chokes I made.

Then the finale of the day came when I went back over to N3ZN’s booth and talked to him about a small POTA key. The next thing I know, I bought one!

This key is tiny, at about 1.5” by 1.5”, it will be an awesome POTA key. I am going to look into how I plan to use it and expect there to be blog posts coming soon about it. I also got to talk to the man himself while he filed out my ticket on it and he is an amazing guy, I count it as a blessing to have met him. Hopefully we will cross paths again soon. If I get the chance I want to share with him my keys I built back in the day, we talked for a while and he is one of the few people that can actually appreciate the work that went into making them.

In closing I wanted to share a photo of my current dream rig, the Elecraft K4 with or without the amplifier, I just want the radio to be honest. At some point I will upgrade from the aging Ten Tec radios in my shack and this is probably what will replace them. I love everything about this radio and quietly take a peek at it when I am at the hamfest, but for now, there is POTA to do and contacts to make with the gear I have!

PS: All I brought home was the antenna analyzer and the Ten Tec tuner, both of which I dont mind holding on to for a while longer…

73

WK4DS-David

Activating a park on the side of the road.

I have been here before but never setup like this. K-0716 has park boundaries in both Georgia as well as Tennessee. I have activated both states with this park and have found this to be a great spot for a simple activation when time is short since the pull-off area is inside the park boundary itself. There is also a parking lot at the top of the quarry too and I will use it next time as I think it will be a little bit less exposed as well as I think I can get a wire up in a tree there. This location is called Eagles Nest and is a rock quarry probably used when the old Wauhatchie road was built back in the day, I couldn’t find any reference to the name of the place online, but it has this huge NPS sign so it is a thing…lol.

Today saw use of my trusty 20 meter ham-stick and the single 20 meter tuned counterpoise wire. I ran the counterpoise over to a large rock and draped the weight over it so that it kept the wire taught. This made setup pretty fast and simple, I was on the air in no time really. Although I did start out with the external speaker on my power pack for audio, I quickly realized the error of my way as the traffic was going by on the other side of the truck and made copy difficult at best. So I switched to my ear-buds and suddenly was able to copy all sorts of stations I couldn’t hear before!

I am pretty sure this forms an elevated counterpoise system and makes the antenna work better than laying the counterpoise on the ground…

The station today was setup in the rear floorboard of the truck and I was using the power pack I built containing a 3Ah Bioenno battery. I just used it to prop up the radio so I could see the display are reach the Aux switch for memory keying.

There was a little QSB on the bands today, but for the most part they were open really good, I was able to get runs of 10 minutes at times with strong signals coming in and I was even getting decent reports back to me. for the most part. But what was strange was that after I worked N9EDL it was like the band just closed or something, I called CQ for 10 or 15 minutes without so much as a peep coming back to me. It was like someone just turned the switch off… Then again the last 5 or so in the log are starting to spread out more than the previous contacts so it might have just been a deep null in propagation and if I had stuck it out it would have come back.

I took that as time to close up shop though and shut down the radio and packed it all up. It was a great little activation and I had a great time doing it even with the traffic on the other side of the truck. Good quality headphones saved the day here, so that is the lesson from this trip. Until next time. 72 de WK4DS

Somedays you just make a mistake…

Today is Sunday, 6 AUG 2023 and I had a small window of time to get in an activation in the late afternoon. Teresa also decided to ride with me so she could get out of the house and planned on using her computer to do some projects she had been wanting to do. I forgot she mentioned that she would need AC power and this turned into a problem for me or so I thought. The inverter I have in my truck is apparently not very “clean” from what I saw today on my S meter…once again so I thought.

We get to the park (K-2169) and I grab the photo you see of the storm front coming into view. This is when I realized I would need to hurry if I was going to setup in time. I throw out a counterpoise and stuck the 20 meter hamstick on the back of the truck and ran the coax into the cab. I simply taped up the connector to keep the rain out and got back in the truck just in time before the deluge began.

So then once in the cab with it raining buckets outside, I do some yoga moves to get turned around and uncrate the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 transceiver. Since it is in that huge military case in the back seat, it was not easy to get it out from the front seat with the doors closed and Teresa in the seat beside me. I finally get the radio loosed from the surly bonds of the hard case and setup on the armrest of the truck seat.

I learned something at this point. I had blamed the inverter and Teresa’s computer for the rf hash I was hearing on the radio. Well, turns out when you are setting up in an active thunderstorm that the atmosphere is charging and discharging constantly. The static buildup is audible and visible on the radio as I watched the S meter climb to S9+10dB, hold there for several seconds then a flash of light would happen and the noise floor would drop to S2 and I could hear other stations again. Then the process would start over…

I listened to this a couple of times fascinated by the phenomenon I was witnessing in real time in front of me. Then it occurred to me that the static discharge that was resetting the S meter to normal was LIGHTENING!!! “Good grief, I’m such an idiot” I thought… I hurriedly shut off the radio and disconnected the coax as fast as possible. I threw the cable into the back seat and waited on the rain to let up. I figured since it wasn’t grounded that it wouldn’t attract a lightning strike and I was right as it didn’t hit the antenna. That is my theory at least… Once the rain subsided to just a drizzle, I pulled the truck forward to get the counterpoise out of the grass, got out and quickly broke down the antenna and stowed it in the truck bed. Once back in the truck the rain picked back up and I threw in the towel at this point and just headed home.

Mother Nature has a cruel sense of humor at times though so just as soon as we cleared the park and was on HWY 136 headed back home, the rain literally stops and the clouds start to break up. I was too frustrated at this point so I just went on home instead. I don’t count this as a failed activation officially as I never sent a CQ, but in reality, I should as I had the entire station online and never made a single contact. That would make this the second failed activation in my entire POTA “career” you might say. I should have believed the weather man…errrr… app when it said a front was inbound. Next time I will pay attention.

I never even opened the logbook today…sad. I should have stuck it out 15 more minutes, I could have gotten an activation in by the end of the UTC day at least…

Thanks for following along, but the point of this article is to pay attention to the signs your radio gives you about thunderstorms. If you see the S meter climb and it has a ton of static on the band with a constant signal and then it just drops back to normal all at once and you either see a bright flash or hear thunder a few seconds later, this is probably the clouds and you might want to turn your radio off and disconnect the antenna…just as a precaution.

73

WK4DS - David

Band conditions can be evaluated quickly.

When I figured this out I was doing an activation and decided to take a bunch of screen shots to show what I am talking about.

The other day I was activating K-2169 and kept getting signal reports with people telling me there was QSB (that is band fading for those that are not familiar with CW shorthand terminology). A little later into the activation I went to the POTA spot page to check to see what my most recent signal strength report was and thought…self, what does the history look like for this activation?

Now you have to take these reports with a grain of salt as the reporting stations are all over the place, but the signal reports as still indicative of what is going on with the band from where I am to the areas these listening stations are in. It also shows that the signal was fading in and out pretty hard every few minutes which is why I would go for five minutes at times with no one calling me back. then I would work for or five in as many minutes. These little short band openings are all I got when running QRP… So to get these reports you will log into the POTA spots page and pick a station that is active and click the little symbol next to the re-spot button and it will pop up on the screen. Looking at the history a little will show if the band is strong or weak or that it is fading in and out and even what the interval of the fading is so you can kind of tell what will probably happen in the next few minutes. I think this is a valuable resource that a lot of people don’t even know is there.

I hope this helps someone on their ham radio journey. 72

Testing a new power pack for backpacking…

This is the idea… I think I want to do some SOTA activations after listening to K4SWL talk about them on his YouTube channel. So this means that I need a smallish radio setup to be able to do these kinds of activations. I have to be able to pack them in and out from the SUMMIT, yeah, the very tip top of a mountain…

Today’s blog post covers the idea I have for a power source. I am going to use AA batteries. I know I can buy a Bioenno battery, but this gives me the options of picking up regular alkaline batteries if need be (I plan to make a couple of aluminum dummy cells for this option so the voltage wont be too high). It also allows me to repurpose the cells for my HT radios too as I have them configured to used these batteries as well. I found these 10 cell battery holders on Amazon and ordered one to try it out. Since it hold 10 cells, the voltage is higher and gets closer to the regular battery voltage everyone uses. The cells are 1.3 VDC when charged so this adds up to just over 13 volts in this kit. I measured the pack today before the activation at 13.2VDC…Perfect for what I wanted. So I load up the new battery pack and head over to K-2169 to test out the power pack life with a POTA activation.

The above photo is an optical illusion that has to do with the shutter speed of me camera and the refresh rate of the display on the radio, to the naked eye it was not gapped like this but looked fine. This little radio is a perfect little radio for SOTA so I am going to use it for that purpose.

Here is the basic radio kit as I plan to deploy it. The headphones are smaller and lighter than my box speaker/battery pack I made. I can also hear better on headphones too so it just made sense to use these instead. These are Sony headphones if I remember right, but I could be wrong. I will also be using my little travel key I bought as it is perfect for this project…till I get the new one that I plan on in the not-to-distant future.

I also plan to use a 40m EFHW antenna for my activations and just work 40m and 20m bands with it. This is the simplest antenna setup I can come up with as it doesn’t require a tuner and is pretty small for what it can do. I might get one of the compact verticals at some point, but for now that will have to do. I will also take a piece of throw line and a throw weight as well to get the antenna into the air. I will also add a piece of coax as this is the counterpoise in most cases. Otherwise I will need a coax AND a counterpoise… so I will eliminate the counterpoise and just work off the coax shield instead. Above is the tuner I used today as it was still in the truck from the last activation and I know how good it works.

This is the beauty of using campgrounds to activate, there are plenty of tie off points for your antenna system. LOL

After working almost 50 contacts over about 2 hours with almost all of it either making a contact or sending CQs meaning there was significant battery draw over these two hours, the battery voltage had only dropped from 13.2 to 12.82VDC. A little less than .4VDC or about 3% of the pack voltage overall. That is great as this tells me that almost any hike-to activation will have plenty of power to make contacts. I dont think I will be doing SOTA where I will have more than two or three hours on the summit for radio as there is the hike to and fro that has to be factored in as well. I call this part a success.

Pro-tip to the new hams just getting going. Grab a cheapo little volt meter for a field meter. This one was only a few dollars and worked perfectly. This technology has gotten very affordable and can be a priceless tool when you need to check the continuity of a piece of coax or to see if the battery pack has voltage on it like here. It has come in handy quite a few times now and stays in my POTA kit all the time. Until next time…72

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…

There is something therapeutic about CW and QRP for me.

I really enjoy activating parks when I need some time to myself. I tend to not ask people to go with me but instead just go alone and I think I know why now.

Today was a perfect example is why I figured I would write about it. Today wasn’t particularly stressful but rather just really busy with lots of little tasks needing to be completed all day long. This slowly took its toll on me and I really needed some down time to get myself back in alignment.

A park activation was just the ticket. I find activating a park to be very soothing whether I have a huge pileup or no one answers me for minutes at a time. I also like to go by myself as well as I have concluded that direct human interaction is stressful for me and I don’t want that when activating a park. The radio contacts for POTA are rhythmic in nature and give me something to focus on that is low stress. Especially with CW since using CW for me still requires me to think about what I am hearing for now.

Take this operating position above for instance, it is simple yet functional and it is fully immersed in nature. I think this is another reason I like activating parks, it gets to a quiet place away from the busy world around us.

Another thing that is magical about it for me is how I can transmit a simple signal with just a few watts of energy and someone listening on the other side of the continent (and sometimes even other continents) can hear that signal and reply to it. Today was a hamstick kind of day as it is quick to deploy as I only had 45 minutes before the UTC day ended and I needed my “ten QSOs” before that happened.

This 2” pvc pipe makes the perfect hamstick storage tube and holds 5 hamsticks with qd mounts installed just fine. It is actually too long but not by much. It fits in my truck bed…exactly… with no wiggle room so I just use it. Today I simply strung the counterpoise for 20&40 meters and just used those bands since I can usually get an activation pretty quickly with those two bands. So to change from 20 meters to 40 meters I simply unplug one antenna and snap on the other. No tuners needed or anything, just a band change and we are off to the races.

Another thing I like here is the simplicity of the TR-35 radio and how it literally has zero menus. It has everything I need and nothing I don’t. Pure CW goodness at it’s finest… well, it could use 15 meters. Lol.

As can be seen above, the bands were fairly alive today and I was easily able to seal the activation before the UTC day flipped over. Signal reports varied as the bands would fade in and out but were favorable for the most part. It was nice to work so many familiar call signs such as KN1R and WD4DAN and even a few Canadians to boot!

Thanks for following along today and I hope to work you on the air soon. Until then 72

WK4DS

I finally went to a different park!!!

This activation is from not only a different park BUT A DIFFERENT STATE!!! Today I activated K-1039 Desoto State Park and it was a lot of fun even though the QSO count is pretty low.

So let’s set the stage here. I had some business to take care of in Ft Payne AL pretty early so I figured I would find a park close by to activate if I had time. Well, Desoto State Park is only a fifteen minute drive from there, so here we go!

Now to be fair, I know this park well as we have spent a considerable amount of time at this park over the years. Backed with this knowledge, I had a pretty good idea of where I would setup for the activation.

The “weapon” of choice today? The Penntek TR-35 QRP transceiver. I have grown to love this little radio over the past year and it is now one of my primary radios I take to the field when activating parks. Here it is with the supporting kit to get it on the air today.

Yes, the cup of coffee is part of the kit. LOL. Of course the antenna is not shown, but I do have the coax and the RF choke pictured. The RF choke is sort of optional as the radio will work without it but I like having it installed. The black box is the power pack/speaker unit I built for this radio, then there is the travel key and a pen and notebook. Done. Simple. I love it.

Below is what the assembled station looked like for me today. I really like to do my activations from the bed cover of the truck if possible as it is more inviting to passerby people and gets me out of the truck. Once I found a clear frequency I dont really need to be right on the radio so I can set it a little out of the way like it is here and just have the key and notebook at hand for logging.

The location I chose wasnt really the best for someone not wearing headphones to be honest. I was right by the road (as you can see below) and didnt take that into consideration when setting up the station. If I had thought about it, I would have worn headphones to be able to hear as cars would pass by. Cars are a lot louder than I realized for some reason. Lol. Lesson learned, I wont make that mistake twice.

This little parking lot is about half way to the old entrance to the park (it is the first photo above) Sadly, most people never see this beautiful stone work done by the CCC back in the 30’s as the main road into the park now goes a different way.

I always try to back my truck into the parking space so the antenna is out of the way. This keeps little adventurers out of my radials and such. But it also lets me setup like you see here which is over to the side and out in the open. Below shows the logbook and the signal reports are kinda telling. Don’t reference mine, the first column, because I don’t have an S meter on this radio so I am just guesswork. The second column are my received reports and they show the bands were terrible.

Locations that are normally 599 both ways are barely getting in the log today. Still got it done though. Thanks for following along with my journey. Until next time…

72

WK4DS

A picnic table activation for a change!

Well, I was beginning to wonder when I could do this again…comfortably. 😂 I have been operating from the truck for so long now, that I felt like I was at a new park when I went to my old favorite picnic table.

So for this “special” event, I wanted to take something out of the ordinary for me. So I used the Penntek TR-35 radio (this doesn’t fit that description but the rest does) and fed it through my vintage Ten Tec antenna tuner to a 65’ random wire with a couple of 10’ counterpoise wires.

To make tuning simple and fast, I use my nanoVNA and simply unplug the BNC from the radio and plug it into the VNA, adjust the tuner for a nice reading on the VNA for the band I want to use and then transfer the coax back to the radio. This way I am not transmitting carriers over the air while I tune and I can visually see what is happening while I tune. It just makes it so easy for me.

Something that I also built for this is the powerpack/speaker unit. This device houses a Bioenno 3aH battery and I installed a couple of speakers as well as a volt meter (that is activated via a push button to prevent battery drain by the meter) and a Anderson powerpole port (added after this activation). I wanted a device that could essentially “complete” the TR-35 sans antenna… It is missing a key of some sort that might just get added a little later. A simple straight key built into it somewhere would be pretty sweet to be honest.

The next thing is how I put up my wire antenna. I first threw a line over this huge tree limb and pulled the wire over it.

Then I threw the line as high into this tree way back here as possible and hauled the wire up about 30’ or so into that tree. It is making a horizontally run wire of sorts and work’s shockingly well. It also keeps the wire out of the way of park goers as well.

All in all, this map shows how well the little TR-35 with a 65’ wire up in the trees worked. I even dialed up some DX on 17m before finishing and worked FY5KE in south America before going QRT and breaking it all back down.

So I look forward to working many more ops at my local park with my little QRP radios in the coming weeks and not being bound to my truck so I dont freeze to death in the process like back in the winter.

72

WK4DS