I had a couple of hours today so I went to K-2169 to setup in the truck since it was… a little rainy.
These kinds of conditions are the exact reason I build the “trucktenna” mount for my truck. If I had not done this back last year, I would not have went to a park today and made over 40 contacts. Plain and simple. As you can see I did do some expedient temporary water proofing with some electrical tape, this will do the job for a couple of hours, but make not mistake, this stuff wont keep water out for the long term and should not be a permanent solution. It will get you by at a POTA park though.
I ran out three radials again today as I had plenty of time and wanted the SWR as low as possible since I knew I wanted to attempt FT8 for a while today once I finished my CW section of my activation. I like this location too as it is out of the way of other cars, there is no need to walk behind my truck in the spot so no worries about people getting into the radials, and I can run the radials out as far as I want without and problems at all. I also opted to run the coax through the top of the door where there is no sharp change in direction with the door seal and door jamb, this allows me to keep the window rolled up and rain out of the truck cab better.
There is something about a vintage pickup truck that is just plain cool to me… yeah, this truck is legit 18 years old at this point. Hard to believe that it is that old to be honest, sometimes…
In the above photo I have a picture of a another truck in the parking lot (the black blob on the right side of the photo) that belongs to a couple of frisbee golfers that we out playing a round when I took this photo. That is one dedicate group of people if you ask me…lol. I would not have left the house today with this kind of weather looming over head. I thought it was a funny image with the rain coming down almost sideways and their truck was a little blur across the parking lot from all the water on the windshield.
I shared the above image of the radio to show how the fan is setup and that it even works when the radio sits like this since it is in a armored shell fitted to it. The fan would cycle during the FT8 session a good bit, probably coming on toward the end of each transmission after about 3 minutes of transmitting at 25 watts of output power. It also gets the radio out of the way of the armrest so that I can log easier too. It also puts the screen at an angle that is easier to read as well as manipulate since it is also a touch screen to control the radio and I don’t use the mouse and keyboard in the field, just the touch screen.
In the below photo you can see the radio working WD5BFH for a QSO. This in itself is of no real importance to the story, but I grabbed this image to share a unique trait of the sBitx radio. That is, it will ignore some call signs and will not let me click on them to complete a QSO for any reason. The call W7PK called me several times and you can see many of them in this photo, but I could not accept his call at all. I tired numerous times to select him for a QSO and it would not do it. To test this function, I chose other calls and those worked fine. I don’t know why either is the main problem. I have some homework on this part to figure out, this is not the first time I have ran into this problem on this radio, but it is pretty infrequent. It will just chose someone for some unknown reason and not let them talk to me on this radio using FT8…
You can also see the top of the logbook page also in this photo and this is how I setup the screen when running FT8, it allows me to see the completed and logged QSOs while it is working a new one and I have time to write down the last one and put it into HAMRS for my ADIF file. This is why I like to run FT8 at the beginning (while I am getting my logbook ready in HAMRS and my spot on POTA) and the end of the activations, it allows me time to do housekeeping while I am also able to make some contacts on a different mode as well. I really like that.
I had trouble at the beginning of the activation getting connections on FT8, and that is why I hopped over to CW after only 3 contacts. Sometimes one mode doesn’t work and the other does… it is kind of the luck of the draw. As you can see the CW section showed up in great number.
All in all, it was a good time and I made over 40 contacts today, which is a good day for me. I really like it on days like today as I really couldn’t do much else today, other than work on projects in the machine shop… It was really the perfect POTA outing in my book.