15 meters was on FIRE TODAY!

I don’t normally chase DX…

But today it wasn’t really an option to do anything else at one point. I had been wanting to use FT8 on the higher bands but had not had much of an opportunity lately. I got a day off and the bands were on fire so I figured it was as good a time as any to setup a POTA operation and see what I could do. As you can see in the above photo, it went splendidly well.

This was the operation position today. The cab of the truck has become a familiar place recently what with the temps being so low. (I really should get the armrest recovered at some point.) The difference was today is that I was just lazy and didn’t want to setup away from the truck. So I used the hamstick antennas and just sat in the truck to operate. It really is a convenient location to setup a POTA activation to be honest. Today also saw the use of my new Christmas present, a small writing table that hangs on the steering wheel. This is handy once you get it setup properly. I was able to log while operating and even was able to do some call sign searches on QRZ.com at the same time.

Above shows another milestone as well, I finally worked my friend KV9L on FT8! He is the person that got me into digital modes to start with and it took me months to finally get on the bands at the same time as him and then find a band that would support our QSO, turned out to be 30 meters today was that band. I worked a bunch of 20 meters FT8 before I moved and tried to find him on 30 meters though, but the antenna I was using has the wrong take off angle to be able to hear him on 20, so that is why we moved to 30. Once on 30 meters, and after our SKED (of sorts) I worked a few more ops there before getting my “chip in the big game” and moving up to 15 meters. Boy did it pay off too! My very first contact on 15 meters was Russia! Then it was DX station after DX station for the next hour, with one lone US operator hopping in as well. I would have to reposition my transmit frequency from time to time due to band crowding and such but the QSOs were steady. People will transmit right on top of you and if you don’t have any power…like me… you move somewhere else. Well with that kind of luck, I figured I would hop on CW and work a ton of CW contacts too…

Didn’t happen like that at all. I worked two ops on 15 meters CW, there just wasn’t anyone on the band and it was fading pretty hard for CW to hold up. I did get one DX station and Paul (KJ7DT) from Idaho so the mileage was still working great, just wasn’t many ops down there at this point. One of the reasons that I think the band held up so well for me today was the nanoVNA. As you can see below, the SWR plot shows that I had the radials positioned perfectly for a broad-banded usage potential on 15 meters, I thought for a minute about hoping on SSB and see what I could do, but really wanted those 20 meter contacts more… lol. With things this good I had to get on FT8 a while and this is where I got all that DX. When the conditions are right, you just get in the groove and have a wonderful time.

As you can see above, I was using the sBitx V3 with the native FT8 software today. It is functional and efficient, but it is the only one I know how to use at this time. Maybe at some point I will get FT4 going too. But for right now I am happy to be making FT8 contacts on this little radio.

Once I got finished tinkering around on 15 meters CW I decided to see what I could do on 20 meters CW. I moved down, which involved an antenna change… This means getting out of the truck, going around back and switching the ham sticks out, then if I have not done it yet for the new band, I have to install the radials. Fortunately the 20 meter radials were already setup so it was just the vertical and back inside the truck to check the antenna prior to putting RF on it and then setup the radio on 14.063mhz and started calling CQ. Well it didn’t take long and the calls started coming in from all over the USA. I had wonderful propagation today to all corners of the Untied States and the logbook reflects this as well. I even worked a VE7 call that was in Arizona! Everywhere from Washington state to Mississippi was there today, it was awesome!

This QSO map says it all, The 15 meter band was a great long distance band on this day. Just look at all those pins in Europe and Russia! If you don’t normally venture far from 20 and 40 meters, I would highly suggest giving the higher bands a shot sometime, you just might be pleasantly surprised at what you find! KV9L said that 10 meters was just as good if not better!

I hope this story inspires you to get on the air and try something new.

73

A Frozen activation…

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!

Broken antennas and a quick activation at K-2169 is what ham radio is all about!

I started today’s activation at the Sitton’s Gulch parking area. This is a quick access location for me as it is only about 15 minutes from my house to this spot.

First thing I had to do before the activation though was make a new center conductor for my hamstick mount. Since I made the truck mount out of thicker flat bar stainless steel in the machine shop, it didn’t occur to me that the antenna adapter is going to be too short. Well, it was and I ended up stripping out the last 2 threads on the stud because that was all that was holding it together. Problem here was that I couldn’t reuse it like it was, enter the machine shop at this point.

Below shows the arbor press pushing out the center conductor from the mount itself. This turned out to be a fairly straight forward affair as well, which was nice.

Once out of the arbor press, I was able to examine it more closely. It is a simple part so I decided to make a new one out of bar stock. I dug around in a couple of bins and came up with some brass bar stock and set it up in the lathe and proceeded to cut out a new center stud that was the right size for my needs…

Here we have the new part coming out of the bar and all the unneeded parts (chips) flying off at high speed! Lol. I love machining brass, it is such a joy to work with compared to stainless steel or titanium… Since the stud is press fitted into the body I really had to watch a couple of the dimensions to make sure they would fit properly, but several were pretty loose and were really not critical so I was able to get this part cut out in about an hour total, which for me isn’t too bad.

The solution was to make a new stud that is .200” longer thus allowing for the thickness of my mount. I simply replicated the same measurements, other than the length of the threads, and pressed it back into the housing and now I have an antenna mount with the correct amount of threads for my particular application. I also did one other thing too, I hand fitted the threads to the coupler that screws onto it, this gives me the best possible thread fit between these two part as well as the strongest fit as well. Since I know this is the only place these two devices will ever be together I don’t think it will turn out to be a problem later should there be some need to use it with another setup.

With it repaired and installed on the riser frame, I can now get back on the air and stay warm in the truck too!

Something of note in the below photo is that I use the nanoVNA to check my antenna every time I setup now (or as often as possible as long as I have it with me and it is charged up). I have found some odd stuff a couple of times too because of it. This is how I found the broken coax center conductor a while back as well as some band Sta-kon connectors on my radials a couple of times.

I will even use it between band changes just to see what the SWR is going to be like in a certain band location now. It is a really handy little tool. I highly recommend you picking one of these up and learning a little about it at some point, they are fairly inexpensive compared to the antenna analyzers and will give you the same information plus some. It just takes a little time with YouTube and some patience…

Once the antenna was deployed, I got back in the truck and powered up the radio to see if there was anything going on and boy was there! In this photo I am working FT8 on 15meters and as you can see the band was not very active with FT8 operators (you can see it on the waterfall). No one answered me, probably because they couldn’t hear me very well compared to other ops, and after a while I decided to see if there was any CW contacts on 15. After several minutes of calling CQ, I had netted just two contacts. These two showed how good 15 meters is for distance though with both of them being a great distance away from my park. So sometimes the band just isnt there for you to make contacts even if the RBN says it is.

All that aside, I started on 20 meters as it is my goto band if I dont have a lot of time. If you have been reading my blog posts for a while, you will know this, so here I am on 20 meters and I decide to start on CW this time and see what I can find. I get my spot on the POTA site and off we go, it didnt take long to secure the activation and then some and once I had cleared the little pile up I had going I decided to hop on FT8 to see what I could do. FT8 went really well there to with me netting 14 QSOs there as well before I decided to move up to 15 meters. What I really like about FT8 is that it is pretty hands off, this allowed me to fill out me log on HAMRS and get it caught up to the most recent QSO before I finished out this mode and changed bands. That is really cool in my book.

Now that I have the wiring in the doors repaired I am able to route the antenna coax though the window the easy way as long as it isn’t raining… This is really fast and doesn’t pinch the coax like running it through the door jamb does when I operate in the rain. You really don’t know how convenient this is till you don’t have access to a feature like windows that roll down… It is almost comical how long I put off repairing the wiring in the two back doors and to be honest, it really wasnt that hard either…live and learn.

In the above screenshot you can see that there was plenty of signal but there just wasn’t many CW ops on the band. I did get one Canadian and Paul up in Idaho before going QRT though. I was happy to get at least a couple of contacts once I setup on the band. It is always interesting to see what the range of a band is when the higher bands are open. I have gotten some pretty long distance stuff with some really bad antennas on 10, 12 and 15 meters in the past. It just takes going up to those bands and looking around and the right time of day for it to work…the band has to be open too, but we all know that at this point…lol.

Today’s key was the Gemini Ham Radio travel key, This little key is great for me as it is the perfect size for my hand and I really like how it collapses into the housing for travel. When you take it apart, you see how simple the design is and that you don’t have to have this super complex device to send good code. This thing really is pretty simple and it works great.

Below shows the radial field I laid out today and this was just to give it something to work with as they are all on the same side of the truck! I used one of my tuned 20 meter radials and the set of 17 meter radials and this gave me great SWR on 15 and 20 meters. I like it when this works out… Of course, since I am using a ham stick, the truck body is part of the ground plane and the radials interact with it so the SWR will depend on where I put the radials. This is why I always attempt to put them at right angles to the mount if at all possible as this is how I tuned them initially and also allows me to adjust SWR somewhat by simply moving them around behind the truck.

This is also a first for me as my log shows almost as many FT8 contacts as CW contacts. (14) FT8 contacts and (19) CW contacts is a good day when you only have an hour and a half or so to operate. I have never been one to try to get hundreds of contacts in one outing, even though it has happened a couple of times, I am more about just getting on the air and having some fun. So at some point I hope to work you on one of my POTA trips!

73

WK4DS

Something special finally happened to me at a POTA park...

Today had been a pretty busy one at work, so afterwards I wanted to go over to K-2169 (Cloudland Canyon State Park) and just work some contacts to take my mind off things and to just relax for a while since it was 77 degrees on November 7th!

I get my sBitx V2 and head over there with the plan to run my hamsticks since I only have about 2 hours, maybe less, to get my activation in before dark. I roll up to the frisbee golf parking lot and notice another car in the lot with an antenna on the roof…a very large antenna mind you when compared to the ones you usually see on top of smaller cars.

I go ahead and park in my usual location and decide to walk over to see if there is someone in the car and THERE WAS! What do you know, I found another ham already doing POTA! It was none other than KB4QXI (John Law) and he was working SSB with a 20 meter hamstick on the roof of his car none the less. It only took me a year and a half and over 120 activations at this one park to finally run into another ham radio operator doing POTA. John had a pretty sweet system setup in his car with a computer, I assume for logging as I failed to ask him if that is what it was for, but I am pretty sure it is. He was also running a Yaesu radio of some sort on a mount that placed it right in hand’s reach but out of the way of the passenger seat, which happened to be where the computer was residing. I failed to get a photo of any of that so just let your minds run amuck with the verbal description and we will move on.

After talking with John for a while we agreed that it would be best if I setup in the next parking area down the hill which is right at 2/10s of a mile away. I personally figured that was far enough that we shouldn’t have problems with cross talk if I went to 30 meters since I was going to be operating with CW anyway since he was already on 20 meters when I arrived. I figured that if 30 meters was really bad that I could just drop down to 40 instead and work all the locals. Lol. Something else I had not noticed was that this lot had powerlines running right over it (as you can see in the above photo). I figured at this point I might as well give it a shot anyway and see if I could get the activation at the minimum. I did only have about 2 hours till the end of the UTC day at this point.

I setup three counter poise wires, you can see one of them in the photo I took above just barely because I forgot to get a closer photo prior to it getting dark… soooo. Suffice it to say, I ran out the two 30 meter tuned radials and even had the opportunity to run them elevated about 5 or 6 feet above grade, which is probably why my radio worked so well on 30 tonight to the point I didn’t move off that band. Tuned radials seem to work SO much better than radials that are just close. The key when I operate from the truck seat can vary between the Gemini and the N3ZN paddle, it just depends on the mood I am in as well as how fast I want to setup as the Gemini is in the carry tote and the paddle is in the hard case with the Argonaut 5… I normally choose my paddle based solely on things like this as I really like using them all.

After talking to some of the more code savvy hams in the email reflector on the bitx group and them helping me solve the code problem (actually they solved it and told me how to implement it), I was able to get the FT8 mode operational. It actually worked when you called CQ already and it had an issue operating when you would answer someone else calling CQ. It is a stop gap fix that does allow it to work but it doesnt work as efficiently as it should. Still it got FT8 working for me so I am stoked!

To be fair, this is Ashhar’s first iteration of this mode in his hand coded software he wrote and it does work so I got no complaints as it allows me to work the mode WITHOUT the need of an additional computer. He is currently testing a revision that works even better so I am excited to see what happens with that. In the photo above you can see the exchanges and the log entry for my QSO with K4SQL. This is all in the radio too!

On the way out, it was pitch black as it now gets dark at 5:30…uggg. Have I mentioned how much I dislike Daylight “Savings” Time? Well, I dont like it… This is a prime reason too. Even without DST being implemented, it would be dark at 8PM in November. Regardless, I had to use a flash light to break down my antenna tonight.

I powered down and quit before the UTC day flipped over as that would have forced me to stay two more hours to get a second activation in…lol. I do need one more activation at this park to get me over 4000 QSOs. I never planned on getting that many QSOs at one park to be honest, my only goal to start off with was to get 20 activations so I could get the repeat offender award, now I am well north of 120 activations and almost 4000 QSOs! By the time this blog post goes live, I should be past that mark.

Something else of note is that I am currently still logging my FT8 QSOs on my paper log and typing them into HAMRS as there isnt that many of them at this point and I can easily keep up with this quantity manually instead of learning how to export them from the radio and then add them to my HAMRS log electronically or even a new logging program of some sort instead. There will be a point when I will have to do that, but for now I can still get them in the log like this really easily. So till next time warm up the air waves with your radio and hopefully I will work you from a park!

73

WK4DS

2 x POTA Activations plus a new to me mode! FT8 has entered the chat!

I have been busy lately so I thought I would combine the AARs for two activations into one report. These went very fast, well, one of them did. the other did last a coupe of hours and involved me doing something very new for me…FT8…just not with the Penntek TR35. It was used to make CW contacts at the first activation.

The first park I went to was my hometown park K-2169 Cloudland Canyon State Park. This is my go to park when I don’t have a lot of time. I also can go to the Sittons Gulch parking area which is much closer than the top of the mountain by a solid 15 minutes of driving. Well, this is where I went and during the week, I can also get to choose my parking space most of the time too. Today proved a little tough but it worked out. When I got to the park there were a few cars already there and they were literally in all the places I like to setup, save one… So luckily for me there was a space in a corner like I prefer to use as it gives me room to deploy my counterpoise wires and not have to worry about people tripping over them.

I also only deployed a single counterpoise element today as well. I was curious if it would heavily affect my ability to make contacts with only a single radial, but it didn’t seem to matter much on this day. Due to my spot, I was able to run it straight away from the truck too for what that is worth. Seems that if I don’t use a radial at all, the hamstick will use the coax and the truck body for the counter poise and I will have about a 1.8:1 SWR on the nanoVNA, but if I simply add once tuned radial, it drops to 1.2:1 and if I add two it is pretty much 1:1 SWR. This is why I always deploy at least one if there is time at all, it helps with my transmission pretty dramatically. I found this chart online and used it as a reference to see what would be the results of better antenna SWR and as you can see, at 1.8:1 you lose almost 10% of your energy and at 1.2:1 you only lose about 1%. This is why I don’t worry about deploying both radials if I am in a time crunch. I also know that there are a lot of other things at play here like radiation pattern and take off angle, but it is pretty consistent since it is a ham stick every time and I cant easily change that.

Once setup I immediately jump on 20 meters to get things going today and it did not disappoint! 20 meters was alive and well on this day with a lot of activity.

Today’s weapon of choice is the Penntek TR35 Amateur Transceiver. I bought this radio last year for this reason alone and it took me a while to get around to using it as I was trying to get my IC-705 up and running at the time. I finally came around to the concept that the 705 just wasn’t for me and stopped using it. Sometimes a radio, even a wonderful machine like the 705, just isn’t the radio you want to use, so I sold it back in August. I kept this radio though as I really love the whole radio, literally the whole thing is as close to a perfect CW rig as I could get. It has every function you need on the surface that you could want and nothing you don’t need. The built in filters are really well done and it can even listen to SSB if you are into that sort of thing. The compact size also makes for another reason I like this machine, it is destined to be my new travel radio replacing the venerable Elecraft K1 that I also sold last August due to lack of use. I do want to add an antenna tuner at some point to this kit so I can use random wire antennas, but for now it has a tuned antenna in the kit.

This is the kit when setup. The Penntek TR35, the N6ARA Tinykey, a set of simple headphones (with an adapter to make it play out of both ears) and a 10 cell AA battery pack. I chose a 10 cell pack as it will give me almost 13 volts when the batteries are charged and I can use alkaline cells in a pinch by bypassing two cells with a couple of dummy cells I made in the machine shop. The kit also includes several pens, a pencil (since they don’t dry out), a Field Notes notebook, a couple of lengths of coax, one of which has a ferrite bead common mode choke built into it, a 40M EFHW antenna with an additional radial for it and a throwline with a weight, everything you could need to get the little machine on the air.

Here is another thing I like about using my truck for POTA, I can use the bedcover for a table and just spread everything out on top of it like you see in this picture. If I can operate outside I will always choose that option, but sometimes, the weather or time just prohibit that.

I had a good run with the little Penntek TR35 as you can see in the log. So if you wonder how well things can go, this is a 5 watt radio into a hamstick on my truck. It is one of the worst possible arrangements you can possibly come up with and I still ended up with almost two pages of contacts. Now if the bands are trash, then all bets are off, but you really don’t need a ton of power to do a POTA activation and have a good time. On to…

North Chickamauga Creek WMA K-3958

The next outing was in Tennessee at the North Chickamauga Creek WMA in Soddy Daisy TN. This little park has not seen a ton of activations and to prove that, just go to this parks page on the site and look at who (with only two activations mind you) in the top activator and also who holds the highest QSO count as of this writing. Yeah, it is me. There have been some people activate this park, but it just doesn’t get the attendance of places like The Great Smokey Mountains or even Cloudland Canyon State Park. I don’t understand why either, it has easy access and is pretty close to town. Maybe after I write about it and give it some notoriety it will see some more attendance…who knows?

I was here on a Friday during the mid day hours, so the park was pretty much abandoned except for me and a couple with their dog in the river bottom. I setup in a spot where I had room to deploy a radial and got the sBitx v2 out this time as it has a mode built in that the Penntek TR35 does not…well actually it has a bunch of modes that the Penntek doesn’t have, but this radio is special in that it will do FT8 natively in the radio. Yeah, no computer, no sound card, no setting up complicated software, no figuring out how to get the computer to talk to the radio and vice versa. You just choose FT8 from the mode list, dial up the frequency, set a few things like your call sign and grid locator and hit Call CQ. Now, the radio is a beta version of sorts and it has a few bugs to work out, one of them is currently in the FT8 section too, as long as I am calling CQ and a QSO ensues, the whole thing works like clockwork, but if I answer another operator’s CQ it has a glitch and wont sequence correctly. So I can use it for now, but only if I call CQ. Even so, it still works and I made almost a dozen contacts on this day with FT8, so I am happy about being able to use another mode on activations.

Here you can see a QSO has just finished with WD5BFH and the radio even logged it for me! Oh yeah, it even has a logging program running in the background to log your QSOs as well. I really like this radio.

Here we have the antenna layout for today, the single radial was really close to 45 degrees due to the slope behind the truck. That made the SWR even better and I was stoked to get on the air and see what I could find out there in radioland.

I am also testing the reserve capacity of this 8aH battery I bought last year off of Amazon, I keep turning the power up higher and higher to see if the battery can handle it and today saw me using 30 watts of power for almost two hours! I shut down the activation because of time constraints and not because of the battery so it works great for my needs.

Once again I was able to setup on the truck bed cover, and I am acutely aware that I need an easier logging process. Hand written logs are nice, but they are slow to transcribe. I am thinking that I too can come into the 21st century and use a computer to do my logging…I know, I know. I have really railed on battery powered devices, but at some point I guess I just need to bite the bullet and get a computer of some sort for logging. I am thinking of using a Linux based OS for this as these seem to be more reliable and do not update and crash all your stuff… windows, I am looking at you.

This display below is not how it looks when booted up for the sBitx V2 in the native configuration. I have scrolled it down to be able to see the top QSO in the logbook so I can confirm the QSO did in fact get logged when running FT8. The photo underneath this one is what the screen looks like when opened initially. The screen has more information than can be displayed normally so since it is a web browser layout, you simple scroll down to see the other intel. Things like the on-screen keyboard, the logbook and the macros (message memories) are what you find when you scrll down. But the way I have it here is an efficient way to run this mode for me as you can see everything you need on one screen. Sorry for the reflections, it was tough getting this frame outdoors.

This is the native layout at startup.

You can see the time stamps for the FT8 contacts are pretty spread out. This is a function of my operating skill level being low and the lack of “responding to other calls” being buggy with this mode. I know this because the band was on fire that day.

All in all I had a great couple of outings for POTA and radio in general. I hope you enjoyed these after action reports and look forward to seeing you again soon!

73

WK4DS

Activated a new-to-me park today! K-3958

Today was a good day for POTA. I activated North Chickamauga Creek Wildlife Management Area and it was fun! You see, for me to get 80 QSOs in one outing recorded into the log is a feat of the airwaves, so that made this trip one for the books!

K-3958 is also just outside of Soddy Daisy Tennessee at the foot of Mobray mountain. I was concerned when I chose this park that I would have trouble securing the activation as this parking area is right at the base of the previously mentioned mountain. I decided to give it a shot anyway though since I have had great activations at Cloudland in a similar scenario. This WMA is also situated is a gorge and goes right up to the side of the road, the problem is unlike K-0716 on the north end of Lookout mtn where there is a pulloff, this park doesn’t have one on the road. This means my only shot at activating this park today was to find a spot inside the actual parking area itself.

So I roll into the parking lot and start looking for a space that would be suitable for setting up a station out of the truck. I quickly realized that since it was Saturday and near town that it was a popular “waterpark” for the local youth. The lot was almost COMPLETELY full with only a few spaces that were not suitable for most cars. Since I drive a huge 4x4 truck though, this problem posed little challenge for me. I soon found the spot you see in the photos and got started building a radio station. I had just enough room to fit into this space too as you see here, the truck just did clear the trees.

Well, this was kinda tough as to get out of the road, I had to back right up to the bushes. So here I am, bushwhacking my way around the back of the truck as I get out the mount, antennas and run a coax to the cab of the truck. I ran the station from the front seat today in an effort to keep dust under control as the road is literally 7 feet away and is gravel. Compound this with people driving pretty fast as well and it was fairly dusty at times. This was the main reason for giving up on the outside station idea today.

Once setup, I start considering my plan, I figured that I would start on 20 meters so I could be sure to get enough QSOs to secure the activation as the spot page showed a disproportionate amount of activity on this band. Well, let me tell you that my fears about not being able to make contact from this location were completely unfounded. This location could hear just fine. I setup on 20 meters and start calling CQ and it didnt take long at all to get a run of contacts in the log that secured the activation! After that they just kept going and going and going!

Parking is kinda tough here, you have to get the right spot for POTA and on a nice Saturday, this lot is FULL, I recommend coming through the week so there is more room.

This is what the parking lot looked like. Just cars pulled out of the way of moving traffic on the side of the road for the most part. Some spaces were built into the tree line like where I parked and then a ton were like this photo above. Almost all of them had cars in them too. The ones in the trees that were open also normally has something that made a car being there a bad idea, like mine had this huge rock in it but I had enough ground clearance to fit anyway so it all worked out

Today’s weapon of choice was the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 feeding into my hamstick collection. This is one of my all time favorite radios even though it is larger than my other rigs. It is capable of 20 watts but I never run it that hard with 15 watts being my personal maximum output power. Today saw it running at that 15 watt level because I was thinking I needed it to get over Mobray mountain since I was setup literally right at the foot of it. Across the road from where I was setup it starts going uphill and goes straight up the side of the mountain. In my opinion, this is probably the worst possible location to setup a radio, but it worked today so I am not going to complain…

I have found that the hard shell case for the radio makes a great table to sit it on. I like to use the radio in the passenger seat when I run solo ops (which is most of the time). I like this operating position as it allows me to sit comfortably in the truck and operate. This keeps me out of the sun, and I can activate in the rain from this position as well. The Dodge arm rest in the 2005 year model is a huge flat surface too so it turns into a nice little table. Since it is vinyl upholstered, the key doesn’t move around at all on it either, making this the almost perfect work surface for my POTA fun time shenanigans! If you will notice, the window behind the radio was only slightly down. This is because I was trying to minimize the dust buildup in the truck from people flying by right in front of me, there seemed to be no shortage of fast drivers in this tight area for some reason…

Well I sat on 20 meters for about an hour and made contacts the WHOLE TIME! Wow! The hunters were out in force today!!! I made FOURTY NINE QSOs in just over an hour!!! That is awesome! I looked at the POTA page for this park and that one thing alone put me on the top five activator QSO board. It is going to be a great day for the WK4DS POTA operation…

So at this point the QSO rate had dropped off and I figured I would try 17 meters to see what I could do there. Well, there was RF in the shack on this band and this little PICO Keyer is not RF friendly…at all, if there is RF near it, it will start sending strange characters and it would do this on 17 meters today, this told me the SWR was probably a little high due to the position of the counterpoise and so I folded on 17 and went instead to 30 meters.

The nice thing about 30 meters is that it allows you to operate into areas that is only reachable by BOTH 20 and 40 meters. It is strange in that it acts like both bands for some reason. I can make long distance contacts and then the next one will be in Georgia… You just never know with 30 meters how it will work. Well today it worked REALLY well, with me making 28 QSOs on this band in about the same number of minutes. The bands were on fire today! Wow! It did get me quite a few local states as well with North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi coming into the log at this point.

The photos above show what everybody was coming to see. The river is beautiful but the water was way down with only a small stream actually running right now and that made for several pools that the people would congregate around to swim in. I found a couple of fishermen at this spot and they said they were not having any luck due to the low water levels. I grabbed a couple of quick photos and headed back to the truck…

After having such good runs on 20 and 30 meters I figured I would drop down to 40 meters and see what was going on there. Forty meters was not happy today, well at this point in the day that is. Seems that the atmosphere was not happy with my attempt at this band and only allowed me 3 QSOs before I called it quits and went QRT with 80 QSOs in the log for one day. I wrapped up the radio and antenna system and then headed home with a new park and a ton of contacts, what else do you need for a great day of radio? I will go back to this park again but next time I want to go on a week day and see what I can do with less people in the park. But until then, I hope to hear you on the air. 73 WK4DS

POTA Activation AAR and some antenna testing.

Let’s take a look at hamstick antennas and see how they perform without tuning the counterpoise for each band.

No POTA outing is complete without some good ole McDonalds java to get you cranked up. I normally make my coffee at home but today I was in a bit of a hurry so I went through the drive through and picked up some of their magic water. Today I chose the Sittons Gulch parking lot at the bottom of the mountain as it is significantly closer to my home compared to the upper lot. Google Maps says it is a full 15 minute drive from one lot to the other. So operating from here gives me an additional 1/2 hour on the air. That is awesome.

So I setup the station in the truck today and learn a few things that I didn’t know before. One is that the power port on the dash I use is not great at carrying the load of a 20 watt radio. I can see the voltage dip to almost 11 volts on transmit. This is not good. So I opted to switch to the battery and get the voltage back to where it needs to be. This means that I now have another side project to fix this socket… But I am also going to install a direct power feed to the cab of the truck for my winter time ops so I can power the radio off of the truck batteries directly and install a anderson powerpole outlet inside the truck.

Today saw the battery deliver another 2 amp hours of supply, that is four total so far for the 8 amp hour cell. If I get 6 out of it at this point, I will be happy. It is over a year old at this point and it is still going strong. This is not some big name brand battery either but rather some cell I found on Amazon last year. It has seen many activations too. I used it heavily when I was using the Icom IC-705 and kept it in the backpack with the radio. Then when I transitioned to my Penntek TR-35 I used it with that radio for months. So this battery has seen a significant amount of use. I am impressed.

Another thing I have been doing is testing the antennas on the same set of radials (the set I tuned for 40/20 meters) and just switching out the vertical radiator only. I was pleasantly surprised at what I found out today to be quite honest.

Ham-stick antennas work shockingly well for what they are. So well in fact that I am about to go on a 10 park rover operation and use only the 20 meter ham stick (unless the band closes then I will move… lol) for the whole event. My strategy being that 20 meters is the most popular band by far so I should be able to get ten contacts at each park pretty easily. This should give me the best odds at completing my rove and making it to ten in one day. Below is the report from my nanoVNA showing each band I have a ham-stick for and just using the same counterpoise every time. (Side note here, I was also deploying the counterpoise differently too so as to keep them out of the way and this also affects the antenna, see the photo below there is a photo further down in the post showing them). The plots are arranged from the highest band to the lowest but after seeing the results, I don’t think it matters as I dont see a pattern to be honest.

15 meters kinda threw me for a loop. I need to trim the “stinger” some and push this one up into the band more. The null is actually at something like 20.250mhz so yeah, this one needs work. I didn’t have my cutters with me or I would have done it right then. Even so, the SWR was still low enough to get on the air and I was getting RBN reports as high as 20dB which is phenomenal for a 15 watt signal out of a ham-stick several hundred miles away…that is off-tune.

17 meters also caught me off guard. Look at that plot with radials tuned for 20 meters instead! Ft8 on this band will be epic! I have plans to start doing some digital modes during POTA outings in the future so I am happy to see this.

20 meters actually needs trimming too. I have known this for a while, but it is close enough for CW so I have not bothered yet. As you can see, at 14.060mhz on this day, with this radial arrangement, it was still less than 1.2:1SWR. I have had this particular radiator the longest out of my entire collection and bought it last year in anticipation of winter ops. Which it worked perfectly for me in that role. This is why I have slowly collected the set I have now. They just work.

30 meters is honestly the best looking lower band out of the three that I have. 20 is tuned low and 40 needs some help with more radials (most likely), but 30 meters lands just right, with the null point covering the whole band.

40 meters is odd to me. It works and has respectable SWR even with a poor radial field but I would like to see it even better if possible. I think this is more to do with the antenna design and poor counterpoise than anything else. The other bands work great but this one is just not that awesome and I am still sorting it out. Dont get me wrong, 1.46:1 SWR is great but I think it can be alot better. I just need to dial in the counterpoise or something. I am also going to setup another trace on smith chart to see if I am capacitive or inductive and not purely resistive. That might be part of the problem. The SWR plot is nice for simple and quick checks but there is more data to consider. More to come on this…

I did all my tests with the common mode choke installed so I would know what the radio actually is transmitting into. This way I dont get surprises along the way from things not being like they were when I did my test.

The logbook today looked good too. I didn’t have a long time to work the activation so I was happy to see 23 get into the log today. That is a good day for me. I was a little sad though since I was getting picked up on the RBN and could hear stations on 15 meters but no one could hear me… Oh well, maybe next time.

I messed up the sequence and had to correct it. Hence all the scribble in the margin… sorry about that.

Thanks for coming along on this after action report, hope to work you on the air soon!

72

WK4DS

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!!!!

The weather can be fickle…

We went to my local park (K-2169) to do a little POTA and to enjoy the nice weather there.

I setup at the canyon rim today in the shade and got my rig setup in my usual tree and everything. I look on the web and the MUF showed that 17 meters was open and I dialed around and did hear stations so that was promising. I tuned up the antenna on an open frequency and started calling CQ…and called and called …and called. No one answered my calls for something like 10 straight minutes. I even had someone respot me once but never heard anyone on the air

I even took a few minutes to confirm that the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and the Ten Tec 277 Antenna tuner were set correctly with my nanoVNA. They were in fact set correctly…so I just wasn’t being heard on 17 meters. Probably because I am only using 15 watts from the Argonaut. Maybe because the band sucked like a Hoover vacuum cleaner that day, who knows…

This antenna tuner is the Ten Tec 277. It has options to connect a COAX to an antenna, a balanced line to the antenna and even a random wire input (which is what I was using on this day) The variety of connections is what led me to acquire it in the first place, I like the ability to use it with any antenna I have and it works quite well in that role. It is easy to tune and the SWR meter works well too. I don’t use it as a traditional SWR meter though, I use it to watch for changes in the antenna system. If the SWR starts to climb then I know something is changing and I need to look into it, I have had things like the counterpoise wire break in the crimp lug before and not realize it due to it being inside the heat shrink tubing and this meter showed it to me. It also works for tuning purposes if I forget my nanoVNA as well.

My nanoVNA kit is almost entirely adapters and the tiny little VNA over to the side. I love this device and wonder how I got along without one before.

Anyway, back to that activation on that day. Since17 meters was apparently turned off by this point, it was with a heavy heart that I QSY-ed to 40 meters. I tuned up and started calling on this band and it didn’t take long to get someone in the log. After getting quite a few “locals” on 40 meters, I shifted my focus up to 20 meters. For me with my low antennas in park activations I will normally get closer states on 40 meters and more distant stations on 20 meters and higher. That is one of the reasons I like 17 and 15 so much. When they are open I have had great performance with DX stations. If you look at the map below, the close in contacts are all the 40 meter contacts and some of the closer ones are 20 meters.

I just love maps like this one where there is this one lone QSO way off.

It was about this time that the storm clouds really started to look ominous on the western horizon. But they didn’t really seem to be moving closer so I kept going. Well, 20 meters was open is all I can say. My very first QSO on 20 meters was with G3WPF in the UK! I actually thought he was an American station and I was missing the first letter so I had him repeat it a couple of times…lol. I am glad he didnt give up as I figured it out finally and got him in the log. What an awesome way to hop on 20 meters with! DX right out of the chute!!!

As can be seen from the logbook, I had a decent run on 20 meters before two things happened at basically the same time. The storm started to move into the area, and another ham tuned up on top of me and I couldn’t hear stations anymore. I chalk it up to them not being able to hear me as I was only 15 watts into a random wire pretty low to the ground. Anyway, that was enough to get me to call QRT and pack it all up before it got wet.

Until next time I hope to hear you on the air!

de WK4DS 72

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

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

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…

One of the reasons I like POTA

The first picture is one of the main reasons I like POTA. Being out in the field with a portable radio and being able to make a reliable contact with it is just special to me.

The parking lot was almost full when I arrived and fortunately for me, the space I wanted was open! That is me all the way over to the left at the end of the row. The perfect spot to be if others are in the lot as there is no trail here so no one will be tripping over the antenna parts when the come and go.

Today I found I had about an hour of free time and the weather was perfect for a change so I gathered up the gear and went to K-2169 for a quick activation. Since the weather was so nice I opted to setup on the tailgate.

When I operate at home, I am in my “shack” which is actually a spare bedroom I have repurposed for my hobbies. That is the one thing I like and don’t like about it. It is indoors. I like it when it is raining or cold outside but I don’t like it when it’s nice weather outside. This is the biggest reason I like going to Field Day in June, that is second only to the camaraderie with the other people.

Today, since I wasn’t in my regular truck (I commandeered one of my shop trucks while they put new shoes on the dodge) I didnt have my usual antenna kit. So today I deployed the 41’ random wire antenna that I used in Hawaii. I also coupled it to my Icom IC-705 with the automatic antenna tuner as well. This makes band changes a breeze…

I threw a line over a tree beside the truck and pulled the wire up as high as I could and tied on a 13’ counterpoise. The tuner connects to the radio with two cables, a co-ax transmission line and a signal/control cable that is simple a 3.5mm stereo cable commonly referred to as a “AUX” cable. It has two AA batteries in it and works fine with these but if possible I will power it with the main battery I feed the radio with, so I also included a power cable in my harness I made up for it. This harness is 6’ long and allows me to connect random wires right to the tuner.

To lift the burden of the wire tension off of the tuner, I also have a small cord connected to the radio end of the 41’ wire so I can anchor it to something near the tuner. This works really well and keeps me from pulling the tuner off the table when something moves the wire like wind, squirrels or people which in turn would cause damage to my tuner.

Today was a pretty good day too, I got my activation in a fairly short amount of time, I was outside in the wonderful weather and I was able to just play radio a little while. That being said, I netted less than 20 QSOs today with signal reports showing I was not very strong…probably because the wire was poorly deployed and not even all the way.

The key of choice today was once again the Gemini I picked up off of eBay a while back. I have ran into two problems with it since getting it. I also use it a lot as it has a great feel and normally works very well. Issue number one is detailed in a previous blog post where I bumped the lever arms at some point and this shifted the action off center causing it to send dits nonstop. I dismantled the key and realigned the lever arms, which is really easy once you see what needs to be done. The second happened just the other day during an activation. I got all setup and started to call QRL and it was just sending trash. I couldn’t get it to send anything correctly at all, just a mess of dits and dahs with no coherent outcome. So I fell on the backup, the N6ARA key and it saved the day. Once back home, I took the key apart to find that the center ground post that the contacts touch when keying, had worked loose and it was about to fall out. It has one small screw that holds it on the base plate and I simply tightened this screw and it was back in business. The lesson here is to have a spare key with you…fortunately I had one and was able to get the activation.

Looking at the map, we can see how the radiation pattern started about 700 miles away probably due to my terrible antenna deployment, but people were still able to hear me so that is all that mattered. lol…

Do you have any tales from the outer planets that relate to anything like what has happened here? If so, let me know in the comments. I look forward to working all of you on the air at some point.

72 de WK4DS

A bunch of POTA activating in one day.

The sunspots were being nice to me today with my tiny ham radio and CW key…

The amateur radio of choice for today is the Penntek TR-35

Well I went to a bunch of parks today. It wasn’t planned, I just found myself in the right areas to be able to get to several parks in one day, so Carpe Diem! I found out later that I only needed two more to get a rover award so now it is on! The first level is 5 parks in one day. The goals go up from there to insane numbers of parks. I am convinced that at the peak levels, you have to operate mobile with vehicle mounted antennas. You just dont have time to activate 20, 25 or even 30 parks in a single day otherwise. It takes me ten minutes to get into the park, stopped and just get the antenna deployed then just as much time to break it down. So all that wasted time has to be eliminated. It would have to be a military style operation to be honest, having someone log for you too if you wanted it to go easily, but 5 or ten should be easy enough…right?

Back to what happened today…

I first made a short stop at my local haunt of K-2169 Cloudland canyon state park. Then I spent the mid day with the family and doing some chores. I wanted to get in an activation before I went to father/daughter brunch and was able to do that with ease. Unfortunately, I had to leave the activation before I wanted to, as there was a decent pile up going and I really don’t like to leave anyone hanging…but the kiddo was waiting for me so off I went.

This parking lot is literally at the bottom of the mountain.

I ended up at the foot of the mountain this time as it saved me a solid 20 minutes of driving by not going to the top of the mountain. This allowed me to stay on the air a little longer and added about 15 QSOs to the log because of it. Signals were strong even with the mountain right beside me. I was honestly impressed with how strong a lot of the ops were on my ham-stick. I used 20 meters as I wanted to be sure to secure the activation in the time frame I had, which was only about 30 minutes from the time I powered the radio on. This is why I didn’t goto the top of the mountain, the drive up there would have eaten all the operating time. As you can see though, the inbound signals were strong and I got a lot of good reports back as well. This location isn’t all that bad to be honest as long as there is room to deploy the counterpoise wires.

Later in the day, after brunch with Sierra (KK4RJW), I was near Harrison bay state park so I figured I would try to get another activation before the day drew to a close. (I was also working on a youtube video for my photography channel and wanted somewhere fairly quiet to record it and this sounded like a good spot). During the weekdays these parks are normally ghost towns and I usually have free reign of the place. This is why I like them for recording video content.

The park is home to a really nice marina and boat ramp and I chose to setup in the far corner of the parking lot where the boat trailers are parked. There was plenty of room here for my radials so no one even gave me a second look. I opted for the 17 meter band as I wanted to see what I could do with it and I wasn’t under the time constraints like I was earlier in the day.

I noticed a lot of these trees were blooming at this time too. I think these are called red bud trees, but to be honest, I am not sure. They sure were pretty though. So I thought I would grab a quick photo and add it to the blog for color.

Since I was wanting to record the footage for my video, I stopped calling CQ after I got 15 QSOs in the log. I always like to go over by a couple so that if I find out I copied a bad callsign, I still have enough for an activation. This one went a little slower since I did the whole thing on 17 meters and didn’t bother to change bands during the activation. You see, right now, to change bands involves me going to the rear of the truck and changing whip antennas as well as the counterpoise wires as these are all tuned independently. I will eventually build the mount that holds 2 or three of these at once (maybe all four) and I will retune the radials to work with all of it set up at once. I checked the ham-sticks and they have unreal selectivity with there being only one resonant null on the nanoVNA across the whole spectrum up to 30mhz. There aren’t even any harmonic bands, just the one they are tuned for.

Well on the way back from Harrison bay, I drove right past Booker T Washington state park…so I said to myself “Self, we should activate this one too” and with that I swung the truck around and went back to get 10 more contacts with the TR-35 and my newly minted ham-stick collection. Turns out this was a good call as you guys came in the clutch! Wow! FOURTY QSOs in short order!

I got there and setup near the playground on top of the hill. These are old campsite spaces that the park no longer uses for camping. The parking spaces are still paved and the grill is still at most of them so people still use the sites to do cookouts now. This in turn makes them perfect POTA parking spots as I spoke with the park ranger and he said it was perfectly fine to setup in these spaces and play radio anytime the park is open. As you can see below, it makes for a great location and there is plenty of room for the radials if I back into the space.

The radials dwarf the ham-stick antenna but the sure do work well.

This time I chose the 30 meter band to start with and then changed over to the 20 meter band to finish up as I was getting a lot of calls from this location. Doing the band change is not really that bad but it is slow enough to make you not want to do it a lot. I think the multi mount for the antennas will make this a great all day rig where I will setup for several hours and want all four bands.

Signals at Booker T Washington park were strong today!

I have figured out how to get the radio to rest on the dashboard of the truck so that I can free up more space on the armrest for the logbook. If fits here perfectly and allows me to connect the headphones and key with just the right amount of room on the wires. It also gets the VFO knob out of the way so I don’t bump it and push myself off of frequency (which I have done in the past). It is still in a location that I can access easily though for speed changes, memory access and such.

Below is my “POTA tote” that I was gifted at Christmas last December. It holds all my POTA stuff and a bunch of extra things too. The tote almost has two complete rigs in it at this point there is so much redundant gear in it. But it is convenient and I can just grab it and goto a park as the ham-sticks live in the truck full time now in a pvc storage tube I made for them (see photo below). I keep them, the trailer hitch mount and the radials all in the back of the truck together so they are ready to deploy when I arrive on location. Easy.

After a good little run of QSOs on 30 then another one on 20 meters, I cleared the pile up and called QRT to go find the wife and have some supper. Little did I know at the time, but I was over half way to a Rover accomplishment. I now know that I only needed two more parks to get the first level award in that and I already know which two I am going to use… LOL So next time I will get my 5 in one day.

Thanks for following along on my little CW adventure in ham radio. 72 WK4DS

A “quickie” POTA activation…lol

What happens when you plan to do something “right quick”? That’s right, it doesn’t happen like that at all. Haha.

I had about an hour of free time today between activities with the XYL and K-2169 was … technically… on the way to meet her, so LET’S POTA!

K-2169 Cloudland Canyon State Park is a 15 minute drive from my house so if you look at that park on the POTA site, you will find I go there a lot. Today, I wanted to get setup quicker than normal, which means I opted for the lower parking lot. This parking area is next to the canyon proper and is where I like to setup my wire antennas in the warmer months.

The lower lot was pretty sparse so I was able to get in a corner, out of the way, which also afforded me the ability to use the side of the truck to shade me from the setting sun. I grabbed a camp chair out of the back of the truck, threw up the 17m hamstick and got on the air. The truck tire made the perfect “table” for the Penntek TR-35 QRP radio too. I used the battery to tie down the coax so it would not slide off the truck and pile up on me (like it did right before I sat the battery on it) and made the station nice and tidy.

I started on 17m calling CQ as I heard quite a few stations having QSOs. After calling CQ for a few minutes I got an answer from NA7C in Utah and then a little later KJ7DT came in strong as well from Idaho. But then I called for a long time with nothing coming back so I decided to change bands and see if I could finish up on 20 meters.

Once on 20 meters, I found a clear spot and started calling CQ again. Just a moment later KJ7DT came back again! This time even stronger!!! Idaho was booming into Georgia today. That gave me hope! So I worked Paul leisurely, as he was the only one to answer my call, and then cleared him to find myself in a ginormous pileup! Where did everybody come from!?!?!? Good Lord I had trouble pulling out single stations. I have never really had to deal with a legit pileup before. Oh sure, I have had 4 or 5 stations call at once but this sounded like 20 or 30! I start plucking out callsigns and in the process of the next 38 minutes I put 38 QSOs in the log. That has to be some sort of a record for me!

Some items of note from today that I found interesting were that I worked KJ7DT back to back on two bands without coordinating that with him, then I ended up working three DX stations today with one of those being DL1AX in Germany, another was VO1SW in Canada and finally CU3DI in the Azores! I even worked a Park to Park for a 2Fer! Sweet! Speaking of sweet, the dogwood trees are in full bloom as well making for a beautiful scene on top of a 40 QSO run on my tiny little QRP radio in just under an hour and that includes an antenna change!

Check out the QSO map I got from the HAMRS app showing the spread. Side note about HAMRS, if the op isn’t found in the Hamdb database, then search them on QRZ and get their grid square and add it to the QSO info if you want them to show up on the QSO map. This is how I get non-POTA ops to show up.

Here is the USA map without the tags so you can see the radiation dispersion of my 5 watts and a hamstick antenna.

I think that I could have most likely worked most of these ops today with SSB and it would have been successful. 20 meters was that strong today. This comes on the heels of the previous evening where I worked Ian in New Zealand on 10 meters via greyline! This has been a good 24 hours for radio! Confirmed via QRZ in real time no less! I am sending him a real QSL card anyway but that always gets me excited. It isn’t everyday that I can even hear New Zealand on 10 meters much less them hear me.

Here is another tidbit about me. If at all possible, I will always clear the pileup before going QRT as I know some of them are needing my park for one of their goals and if I can help them with their goal, whatever it might be, I want to do that. I had not initially planned on staying for an hour but it was so rewarding that I just couldn’t power down the rig. Lol

Today was a pleasant surprise and I look forward to more like it in the future.

72 and I hope to hear you on the radio!

de WK4DS