Today (Jan 20, 2024) was a nice day other than the temperature so I figured I would setup a simple POTA site at K-0716 Chickamauga Battlefield on the Tennessee side of the park. This location is called Eagles nest and is a rock quarry probably for road construction in the late 19th century or early 20th century if I had to guess.
To some people 19 degrees doesn’t sound too bad, but for a Georgia boy that is down right cold! I ran the heater as much as possible to “charge up” the cab with as much heat as I possibly could before I started. Haha.
Since I only had about an hour, I figured I would just work 20 meters to have the highest probability of success. As you can see in the photos, this was a fairly simple deployment since it only used the one antenna and a pair of tuned radials. I also ran the coax through the door jamb to keep more heat in the truck. This deployment style netted me an SWR of 1.2:1 which is really good for my uses.
Here is a photo showing the height of the antenna over the ground. I am 6’2” tall. I really think this helps with the take off angle and also allows better impedance matching by allowing the radials to angle down from the mount. At some point I need to do some experimenting with more shorter radials to see how that would work instead. Dave Casler - KE0OG on YouTube has a great video discussing counterpoise wires and it is worth watching if you are interested in this. It is embedded below…
I did a wide angle shot of the operating position today to show how simple it can be if needed. I propped the radio on the storage case and simply used the armrest for my notebook. I operated both CW as well as FT8 today and it worked fine. If you look close, that water bottle in the console is frozen solid. Lol. I did shut down the truck to get rid of some RFI it is making locally as well so heating it up first was a good idea. The band was in great shape today without any fading that I could hear or see. The below photo is of the sBitx V3 software showing the FT8 portion of the band and how it is very busy with activity.
I am still using paper logging while operating in the field even for FT8 so that I don’t lose any of the contacts I make. The sBitx has automatic logging but it does contain some bugs at the time of this writing and will miss one on occasion so to prevent this, I paper log all the contacts during the activation. This is something that I obsess over for some reason, but I do like the peace of mind knowing that I have a hard copy of the activation should something electronic fail.
All in all, I had a really nice time activating on this frigid day and hope that if I get the opportunity, to work you someday as well. Until then, have some fun out there!