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David Saylors 11/4/26 David Saylors 11/4/26

MTR3B V4 “Currahee!” Maiden Voyage for POTA

I decided to go QRP today as well as use several new things on my activation. I chose a new-to-me LNR Precision Mountain Topper MTR3B V4 “Currahee!” QRP radio that I have had for months now, but have not taken to a park yet. I also deployed a new table as well as used the new POTA map that I wrote about recently. That is a lot in just one sentence, but let me tell you about the activation!

Recording the memory message is pretty straight forward and easy, just slow down the keyer to remove mistakes…

So I wanted to operate with a lightweight kit today. I had been trying to come up with a way to use this new little radio for a while and today was the day. The space weather was supposed to be good, the terrestrial weather was supposed to be better! So I start preparing for this little excursion by charging the batteries for this radio. It is a 10 cell AA battery pack and if you use AA rechargeable cells, it will produce a little over 13 volts when you start. This is not the same if you use alkaline cells, they are about 1.6volts each when new so if you used ten of those, you could easily destroy your little radio. The answer to this is simple. I have a 12 AA cell carrier and in it is 10 rechargeable batteries and two “pass through” dummy cells. This way I have a spare set of batteries (that is needed today) and if I need to pick up some alkaline batteries, then I can just drop in two of these dummy cells and the voltage is back to usable again.

Let me get into all the things that went wrong on this outing today!

First the battery connector on the battery pack popped off the hot glue, probably due to a bad choice of location. This prompted me to go to the shop and re glue it in a better spot which took some time. This worked really well though and I think it will last now too so I am happy with this repair. The next thing that went wrong was the throw line WOULD NOT LAND IN THE TREE TODAY!!! I bet I threw that line at least 15 times into that tree before I got it to land in the right spot! At least fifteen… I did end up with the wire up about 30 feet though so I had a decent elevation for the far end of the antenna. Seems my throw line I keep in this kit is a lot shorter than what I normally have with me. It was maybe 50 feet total. If you have not done the math yet, 30 feet up in a tree takes 60 feet of throw line to go up to the branch and back to the ground… I had to carefully get the antenna and tie it to the cord and then play fisherman a while to convince the weight to slide down low enough that I could grab it and pull the antenna up with. It finally relented and I was able to elevate the antenna.

It was so frustrating!!! Then I get out the radios and start setting them up on the new table. (The table is great BTW, I dont know why I didn’t get this sooner) Well, these two radios that I brought dont have a speaker and only work with headphones… You guessed it, no headphones in the kit. I must have taken them out for another radio at some point and never put them back. This could be a game stopper. I went through all my stuff and nothing. So I thought I will go check the truck just in case I put some in there. Luck favored me here. There was a set in the truck! Back in business. Then I start to setup the radio and the cable for my Begali Traveler CW key would not lock into the MTR3B for some reason. It would click in and then pop right back out. This was incredibly frustrating as I was looking forward to using this key today.

If you will look at the radio above, the Currahee version has a built in “paddle” keyer. Those two acorn nuts on the lower right corner are the dit and dah buttons for a capacitive keyer. So I gave it a shot. It takes some getting used to but it does work well enough. Seemed to work better if your fingers are moist a little. But it worked well enough to get me an activation on 40 meters. Thanks for everyone who suffered through my mistakes while I learned how to use this key today.

Then I noticed the voltmeter on the MTR3B was showing 5.5 volts and the numbers were red. I knew I had charged the batteries before I had left so that was not the problem. I figured the voltage detection circuit was bad in the MTR3b or something. I worked 11 contacts on 40 meters with a radio using these batteries too. Well, it turned out that the batteries were bad after all as when I changed bands to 20 meters, I also changed batteries and the other set shot up to over 13 volts! so you can make contacts with the MTR3B V4 even if you only have 5.5volts to use. This radio is pretty amazing. I got several 599 reports too. I even work Ontario and South Dakota with it!

Let me get back to the activation at the antenna phase. Once I finally got the antenna up in the tree, connected it to the coax and ran it to the table, I found there was nowhere to attach it to the table… I struck paydirt when I saw the little Velcro strap that I tie it up with when I put it away and used it to attach it to the leg of the table so it would not drag the tiny radio off the table.

I didn’t bother with radials since it was a 40 meter EFHW and the coax shield serves as this part of the antenna. The coax I have is ABR Industries and has their common mode choke made from ferrite rings installed on one end. This works well to keep stray rf out of the little radios I use with it. I also looked at the cable for the Begali Traveler CW key when I changed bands and found the problem was just the shell of the connector had unscrewed a little which prevented the connector from seating fully. This allowed me to get back on the air with my good key when I went to 20 meters! Success!

I did like using the little built in keyer on the Currahee as this was the main reason for buying it to start with. I will also tell you that you have to essentially send perfect code for it to work right. You can not simply hammer out sloppy code and expect the keyer to clean it up for you. Your timing needs to be good and if you are recording messages into the memory, you will need to slow the keyer down so you can get good letters. It is nice that they added a backspace key to the recorder so you can erase mistakes as you will make a lot of them… haha. I know, I did.

A simple POTA operation for CW only can be really small.

The weather could not have been better today. It was nice and cool and the sky was sunny. Basically perfect conditions. I recorded just one CW message into the keyer and got started. The reason was that I had already spent over an hour messing with all sorts of things this morning and was starting to run short on time. I used my computer for logging today and that made things go really well during the activation. I also worked a 2-fer today as it turns out. So I can simply duplicate the log and then change the park number and have a second log for the other park really easily.

I used the new map that Miguel LX1MDA built and found that the Trail of Tears national trail and the Chickamauga Military Park share a spot in a couple of places. One is in Georgia that I have already activated. Another that I used today is on the north side of Moccasin bend at the old Federal Road site. As you can see above, the parking area is NOT in the park, but I could walk literally 50 feet to the west and was clearly in both parks! The map has a locator button that will drop the pin on your location when you click it. It is not dynamic so it doesn’t move with you, but you can simply hit it again and it will then move the pin to your current location again. This is why I wanted the table today. I didn’t want to have to sit on the ground to operate… haha. I couldn’t operate from the truck either since the parking lot was not in either park. This left me with setting up where you see the pin. As you can see it is also squarely in the Trail of Tears POTA park too, 2-fer secured! As it turns out, I have operated from a couple of 2-fers already. Most notably over in Alabama and Racoon Creek WMA. Where I set up there is also in the Trail of Tears too. If I get time, I will go back as do those logs too, but dont count on it… haha.

The truck is NOT parked in the official parks, but I am taking the photo from INSIDE both of them!

Once I struggled through the 11 contacts on 40 meters, which was wide open at that time. I wanted to switch bands so I could also change batteries and see if I could get the key cable to work. I also was running out of time and wanted to get another band in if possible… Sometimes you don’t have to go far to get into the park properly. As you can see I had the place to myself for most of the activation. I did have a few people come by towards the end but no one bothered me or even asked me what I was doing. Once on 20 meters, I noticed that the band was quieter, which meant it probably was not really open all that well yet like 40 meters was. I pushed on anyway and started calling CQ. It didn’t take long till I got a few calls in the log. This is when I heard a familiar call-sign come out of the ether! NA2B came ringing into my ears from central Florida! Chaz is a fellow I met while down in Tampa and we went out and setup a couple of activations together. If you scroll down in the blog a little ways, you will find the blog posts about these trips. It was good to hear him on the radio and to be able to put him in TWO logs today! He is also an avid reader of my blog, so thanks for calling me today Chaz, I really appreciate it!

With 16 calls in the log, it was time to break down the kit and go home, I had work to do this afternoon so I had to pack it up. I finally got all the problems out of the way and was still able to secure the activations before I had to leave. A little tenacity goes a long way sometimes…that and I REALLY wanted to activate today… LOL. Yes, those headphones went into the kit this radio is operated out of so I will have them next time! I must admit, the MTR3B V4 Mountain Topper radio is a joy to use. It is feature rich and fairly easy to navigate the menus with. The operation is plain and easy to figure out too. Not to mention it is the size of a pack of cigarettes! It is SO small!

A note about this folding table, I really like it and it is easy to deploy. There is a concern with it though, the slats that form the top deck are held together with stretchy cord. This will not last long so this table will need to have this cord replaced somehow. Option B could be that I change the to to something less pack-able like plywood… The frame is a great design and I think it will outlive the top many times over… Until then though, I will just use it and be happy.

Thanks for following along today,

Correction: I would edit the blog post but it is embedded too deep. The parking lot is actually in the Trail of Tears park. The whole parking lot shows to be squarely inside the boundaries. My mistake.

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David - WK4DS

David Saylors 9/26/26 David Saylors 9/26/26

POTA problems with the TenTec Scout 555

After a solid hour, I got my 4th call. Now what you are not seeing here is the part where I went to 17 meters and called CQ there as well. That was also in that 30 minute block between the third and fourth contacts in the log. I actually thought I would make a few contacts on 17 meters as it usually is open if 20 meters is open.

This activation was very enlightening. I went to US-2169 since it is close to home AND diesel fuel is over $6.00 per gallon currently. I setup at my favorite place in the park, the Frisbee golf parking lot. This place is usually empty on Friday mornings and today did not disappoint. There was one other car that is not in the photo that a group of day hikers exited from and promptly entered the tree line. I never saw them again… I setup in the same spot I like to use, but to be fair, I think I like the spot on the other side of the lot better. This one it the first one I chose, but it really isnt that great for stringing an antenna. I almost have to use the telescoping vertical on the truck mount. The trees near the truck will hold a wire but relative to the truck (read that as to the radio as well) the wire is almost horizontal. This is not ideal for a wire that needs to be above the grade and I assume, the radio…

See what I mean about going on the “off” days? I had the place to myself for the most part. Without another soul in sight I was able to leave the doors open so a breeze blew through the truck and made for a pleasant activation. I setup the TenTec Scout 555 in the passenger seat like I usually do since I wanted to use “truck power” to run my radio. You see, I have a cable fed into the cab of the truck that is directly connected to the battery with a fuse and the other end has a power pole connector on it. This allows me to run my radios in the truck with having to hard wire all of the them. This is nice, but as I found out today, it is also a liability…

I have gotten very comfortable using this station location. As long as I operate by myself, this works almost perfectly for me. I do wish that the armrest could be longer so that I could more easily sit in the seat and log contacts. As it stands I now sit somewhat side ways a little so my arm can work the key with it at the front edge of the arm rest. I have thought about getting a sheet of plywood and covering the back half with cloth and letting it become the surface when I am operating, that would give me a table for the computer as well as the key and keyer. You can’t see the power cord in this photo as it is run under the yellow case, but it is there. At this point, I had already moved to 15 meters after calling CQ for over ten minutes on 10 meters without as much as a chirp coming back to me. I had high hopes too. You see, when I powered up the radio, I had planned on simply hoping on 20 meters and working on an activation since the signal report looked real bad for today, the K Index was a 4 and the bands only showed Fair from 30 through 15 meters and poor everywhere else.

Finally picked up a shorter cable for the nanoVNA to tune the antenna with…

This did not inspire confidence to say the least… But I had the 10 meter band module in the radio so I just hooked it up as it so I could get the circuits warming sooner. The TenTec Scout 555 is a great radio but it had some analog stuff…well…a lot of analog electronics in it and they don’t work properly when they are cold, your frequency will drift while your using it and all sorts of shenanigans. So now, I setup the radio first, get it under power so the idle current can be warming it up and then work on the antenna. I built up the antenna and as soon as I connected the coax, I could hear a station calling CQ! When I looked at the radio, IT WAS ON TEN METERS!!! Ten meters was supposed to be closed right now! Well ,I had just tuned it to 20 meters so back out to the antenna I go with the nanoVNA and tune it up for 10 meters. I get back in the truck and he is still calling CQ! I start answering him and it takes him probably 6 tries to get all of my callsign as I am only running about 40 watts and the band is closed for Christ’s sake. First call in the log today is CX2UI from Uruguay! I am thinking this is about to be a really good day with a lot of calls in the log! Well, it wasn’t. As you can see below it was almost 30 minutes from the first call on 10 meters to the 2nd call on 15 meters… 15 meters was marginally more successful with me landing a whopping TWO calls on that band! Now understand, I dialed up the FT8 watering hole and there were a ton of ops there. If I had brought the sBitx V3 then I could have easily gotten the activation on that mode on ten meters. There was a ton of people there as well. I just wanted to work CW today so I didn’t bring the FT8 radio with me. Constraints like this will make you work harder as it is more of a challenge to get the activation if you dont have easy mode (FT8) available to fill in the gaps. The logbook is upside down as this is a screenshot of HAMRS and that program pushed the call log down and puts the most recent one on top as you go. After nabbing the two calls on 15 meters, it was like the band simply turned itself off to CW use. I tried for almost 30 more minutes to get another contact but nothing was there.

20 meters to the rescue… As you can see, the log is filled out with a lot of 20 meters QSOs. The remains calls only took 40 minutes to get in the logbook. The very last one was a ham that simply answered my call and we had a short ragchew. He also told me that my radio had a birdie or it was chirping when i was sending code. I had noticed that a few minutes into the 20 meter portion I started getting numbers in the 3rd position that were not good. You see, that third number will, pretty much by default, always be a 9. When it is not a 9 then your radio is not working right. I got several in a row with less that a 9 there. That threw me a curve ball as I don’t normally get those kinds of reports. Armed with this knowledge, I took the radio home and connected it to the antenna in my house.

Something I learned from HamRadioCrashCourse on YouTube is that you can dial up these webSDR receivers and test your radio by listening to your signal as it is received by another radio. You are not getting the audio from inside the radio. This is the actual signal that is sent out of the radio, over the air, and heard by another radio. This is the truest test of what your signal will sound like. So I dialed up a portion of the band that had very little use as you can see in the waterfall. Once I found a spot, I adjusted the filter to cut out adjacent signals and then started sending. My signal is the one in the center of the little yellow filter area on the waterfall. The sound coming back to me was perfect too. I listened for a while and it is a little disorienting since there is a delay between you sending and you hearing it. The best way I can tell you to do it is to send your callsign and the word “testing” with the SDR volume turned down and then turn up the volume and sending whatever so you can hear the sound of the signal, and then when your finished, send de Your Callsign and then QRT. It is fine to send a test signal as long as you are not interfering with someone else and you ID your signal. I can not find it anywhere in the rules that this is not allowed as long as you do those two things…well and you know, stay in the allocated band space and don’t exceed the power limits and such as that but you get the point. It is kinda cool to be able to hear what your actual signal sounds like on the air by another radio almost 1500 miles away.

So what did I learn from this today? I learned that the radio isn’t always the problem even if the signal is terrible. Turns out that my cable has a bad connection in it going out to the battery and I was having voltage dips when I would key the radio. I could even see it with the meter lamp dimming on each character during transmit. So I plan to replace that cable with a much larger one on the order of either 10ga. or 8ga copper wire with soon. This and a new fuse holder should get me back up and running in fine order.

Towards the end of the activation, things were all out of sorts and I had to take my time to get it all cleaned up and put away properly. I will usually get out all the band modules I plan to use that day and just lay them on the dash like you see here. it makes it easy to change bands and I can see all of them as well so I don’t lose one in between the seats or something like that. The case for the Begali Traveler key is laying up there with them too, but that just happened to be the best place for it today. It normally ends back up in the carry tote but today it was on the other side of the truck and this was easier…haha. All in all the day went pretty well considering the Sun was mad and I had a radio that was sending trash for code. Moving forward, I plan to make several improvements to the system as a whole and see if the radio will work even better. Have you had a day when there was a comedy of errors to contend with? Today must have been my day as I have not been out since early August to a park at all and I had started to miss it.