Cypress Creek Preserve is a new-to-me POTA park and I think that at this point, I have worked more Florida parks than Georgia parks! That is irony at it’s finest right there!
This is a really neat park as it has ponds with lily pads and hiking trails and all sorts of other stuff right from the outset. Most of the other parks I have been to in this area are not quite so enticing when you arrive with it being more of a parking lot and a simple trail into the under brush more than anything else. It took me a minute to confirm that the parking lot was within the park boundary, but I finally did and setup my radio accordingly.
Once I was parked and started to deploy the antenna, I found this little guy supervising the operation to make sure the antenna was in the proper position to be able to work Europe as well as the west coast. I am really grateful too as his efforts came in handy on this activation!
As you can see in the above photo as to why I wasn’t sure where the park boundary was as there was this huge fence between the parking area beside the road and the park itself, but after checking several maps, I was able to figure out that the parking area was in fact in the boundary.
Once again, to see what I could do at mid day on 15 meters, I decided this would be the only band I setup on.. I ran out the one 20 meter radial that seems to help the 15 meter band and used my 25’ coax as well and the SWR showed up at 1.1:1 which is great in my book so I immediately hop on FT8 to see what is happening while I setup the logbook on HAMRS and get my spot on the POTA site.
Well, it was doing great as I worked something like 6 stations before I had time to put the spot up on the POTA site! This is awesome! I was thinking this might be a day where. I work 50 or more contacts from the way it started…
The antenna system at this point is almost a joke to be honest about it. This radial works on several different bands really well and it is broken speaker wire! I have a spot in the wire where it is literally twisted together so that it is the right length and I am afraid to solder it as when I solder this wire, it breaks next to the solder joint. I have done all sorts of things to try to prevent this too, none of which have worked long term. So I have reserved myself to using it till the SWR readings start to show too much of a mismatch and then I will actually work on it. I use this radial on virtually every outing too, that is part of the comedy of it, the broken radial gets the most use…so is life I guess. Since I was backed up to the fence like you see below, I ran the radial over the fence and was able to lay it out in the grass behind the truck properly.
The activation did hit a few lulls, which was handy as it gave me time to catch up the log in HAMRS so that when I finished the activation I was able to email the log to myself so when I get back I can upload it to the POTA website. As you can see in the log below, FT8 produced a half a dozen DX contacts before I landed my first domestic contact! FT8 is a DX paradise to be honest about it. The weak signal capability of that mode is hard to grasp to be honest. I know this as when I switched to CW I heard nothing but Domestic stations for almost the entire time with the exception of two DX stations that were booming in. This is what I am used to doing to be honest, a sprinkling of DX with almost all domestic contacts.
Here is what is odd about FT8 though, when I went back to work some more while I finished up the logbook, I worked almost nothing other than Americans. It really is the luck of the draw it seems, but you could see on the waterfall that the band had some significant fading at this point and some stations would shift almost 20dB in signal from one cycle to the next, that is pretty drastic and makes me wonder if I had got on the air a little earlier if that would have made more of a difference…
Take a look at the CW portion of the activation and you will see a 10 minute period right in the middle where there is no contacts at all. This isn’t me leaving the station for some reason, I was calling CQ the whole time, there just wasn’t any takers. Then Julia (N1XV) answered me and it took another five full minutes to get another contact! This is unreal in my usual activations …albeit those usually happen on 20 meters and that seems to be the watering hole for POTA CW ops for some reason… Back to this activation, then I work Paul (KJ7DT) and then you can tell the band turned back on as I worked several contacts in a row without stopping as I can work about 1 per minute at the speed I like to use (17WPM to 22 WPM).
By the time I had the logbook caught up, I had worked over 35 QSOs so I wanted to see if I could get to 40 before I went QRT at 21:00 UTC as I had to leave about that time. I was able to get to 41 and go QRT wihtout any replys well before I ran out of time so all is good in the world!
What a day! 15 meters gave me a wonderful activation and I got a bunch of DX as well as cool domestic contacts! What more do you want?
73 - WK4DS