Back on the Air for a POTA Activation
Today saw my take the old Dodge over to my local park (US-2169) for a short activation. I have been busy in the machineshop these last few weeks so there has not been much time for POTA. I have actually not been to a park in several weeks and was starting to miss it.
Update on the park visitor center upgrade in progress. The grade work is done and they are framing the new building at this point. It is coming along nicely too.
Setup of my POTA rig for HF operation
I went up to the frisbee golf course again as this is a great place to setup for POTA. A lot of people will use the nearby pavilion when they setup, but my antenna mount, being attached to the truck, makes it alot easier to operate from the truck. This is an amazon 18’4” whip that I bought, you can get one too at this link: Link to 18’4” whip on amazon Now, to just let you know, this is an affiliate link, but it doesn’t change the price from what I can tell… At the time of this writing, they were on sale for 27$, which is incredible!
Today I used the 18’ 4” foot vertical telescoping antenna and two radials attached to the base. Then ran a coax into the cab of the truck to the front seat where I normally set up the radio in the front passenger seat. Something I noticed today was that no matter what band I was on, the SWR plot would never get better than 1.5:1 (which is perfectly fine BTW) but I can normally get way better matches with different radials, which tells me that the radial length is more important that people let on…
Next, I chose the TenTec Scout 555 as it is a wonderful CW machine. It does have a little bit of drift in the VFO, while it warms up, but it is not enough for me to worry about. I started on 20 m in the CW portion of the band and hunted stations to start with. I worked another POTA site for a park to park contact before finding my own space and setting up there. I made 19 CW contacts on 20 m before I decided to move to 15 m to see what I could find there next.
Pay attention to bad antenna connectors…
When connecting the antenna today, I had trouble getting the BNC to attach, upon closer inspection I had found that it was crushed from impacting something in the truck… Probably when it was in the red Chevy as there is less protection in the back of that truck as compared to how I store it in the Dodge. Oh, and yes, my heat shrink tubing on the coax has slipped back for some reason. I noticed it when I was breaking down and simply slid it back into place…haha. I did not notice this until I attempted to use it today to operate this activation.
I attempted to straighten the damaged BNC connector with my Leatherman as best as I could, but it didn’t work really all that well so I got in my adapters for my nano VNA and robbed the one that was in that pack and used it instead.
This is a great example of why you always carry spare parts for all of your connections so that you don’t get shut down because of something getting broken unintentionally that you are not aware of.
The HF Signals sBitx V3 and native internal FT8
Once I finished working CW on the Scout 555, I decided to get the sBitx out for a while to work some FT8. I really love using this radio for FT8 and CW in parks, it works so well and with the version 5.3 software, it has a metric ton of great features. The waterfall works well and the automatic modes in FT8 are really handy too. This radio is 25 watts on the lower bands and trails off to about 12 watts on 10 meters. This is plenty for me as I work a lot of QRP anyway so little to no power output is fine for the most part. Would it be nice to work with more, yes, but I can manage without it just fine.
Today I only used it for FT8, but I also will use it for CW from time to time. It is a little temperamental in CW since it is a Raspberry Pi 4 running in the background, but once you learn the keying, it works fine up to about 23WPM for me without too much issue. Using something like the Begali Traveler CW Key in the photo below also makes it more fun too. A really nice key is always a good thing to have with you.
Once I worked a few FT8 contacts on 15 meters, I dropped down to 17 meters and worked a few more there before shutting down for the day and heading home.
I noticed when I was getting ready to leave that the truck motor was “squeaking” when it was idling and when I investigated further, I found that it was a pulley on my fan belt had a bad bearing in it. So I went to the auto-part store and got a new one to replace it with. Once home I was able to replace it in short order so that I would be ready for the next POTA outing that I wanted to go on. Sometimes things just come up and you have to take action…haha.
Thank you for following along and I look forward to sharing something with you again soon, till then 73!
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