Activating Tallulah Gorge K-2202 AAR with photos!
Today saw me leave Maggie Valley and head south as I had to be at the Atlanta airport at 6PM to pick up the girls on their return trip from Belize. Since I was going to have all day to complete a 3 1/2 hour drive, I figured I would take my time and stop at Tallulah Gorge State Park and do two things. The first was to activate the park as it is a POTA park and two was to goto the canyon and get some photos for my photography video I am making.
Well I get there and it is sprinkling rain the whole way down and it is basically raining when I park. I debate for a minute if I should activate first or do photos first and my desire to stay dry outweighed my desire for photos. So I set up the sBitx and just the 20 meter hamstick as this produces about 1.5:1 SWR which is usable and I have never had trouble securing an activation like this in the past, today would be no different in that respect although something notable did happen as a result, or so I believe it is a result of the higher than normal SWR… As you can see, all of the parking spaces, negated the ability to back into the space as the area was difficult to maneuver in, so they made all the parking spaces “pull in” at a slant angle. Since I could not back in I did not want to be spreading out a counterpoise wire risking park staff saying something. So I ran it wiht just the antenna…
To start with I wanted to do some FT8 as well as this affords me some time to do some other stuff like setup my logbook in HAMRS and get my station layout sorted and such. I like how automated it is for this reason alone. It also allows me to check things like the antenna tuner since it does those long transmit sessions as well. It didn’t take but just a few minutes to get a half dozen contacts in the log and this mode is not optimized in the v2 software. So after I spent about a half hour on FT8, I went ahead and switched over to CW to see what I could here there. Well, the band was pretty active. I had also scheduled my activation so I was confident that the RBN and the POTA networks would spot me. I did this as I had already been to two parks that didn’t have cell service and I had never been to Tallulah Gorge before therefore I didn’t want to take the chance on it not having service either. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did, in fact, have great cell service so this part went great. Below you can see how I propped the radio against the storage case I picked up at Harbor Freight and it put it at the perfect angle to interact with the touch screen. I also saw where another ham swapped out the VFO with one off of a Kenwood and it looked great, he said it also felt great too… has me thinking about making one for mine now…haha. Also note that N3ZN key, this is what I was doing while I was also making FT8 contacts, I have been working on finding the right setup for running CW from this location and this is where I put the key today to see how well it would work. It worked ok, but I did end up moving it and there seems to be no location that makes it a solid “the key goes here” spot when I operate in the truck…
Once on CW, I work a little over 20 contacts then this is where things take a strange twist, I decide to continue sending CQ, as the system was working well, and it just shuts off abruptly. Some simple troubleshooting found that the fuse was blown. So I scramble around and find a fuse that was slightly larger than the one that blew, put it in the system, turned it on, and it immediately blew that fuse as well, so that tells me that something is wrong with the sBitX v2 at this point. It could be the finals in the transmitter, or it could be the large power transistor in my home brew fan control circuit that could have went bad as I did not have a heat sink on it. The fan pulls such a little amount of current, only 300mA, and the transistor was rated for 6 A that I figured it would never kill it. It may not have and it could have been the higher SWR that I was seeing compared to when I normally have the SWR at almost 1.1 to 1 or better. I have heard that the transistors in this radio are on the small side of max voltage and the SWR could have pushed the voltage high enough to kill them… Spoiler alert…that is exactly what happened. Once I got home, I found that one of the finals was shorted completely, I replaced both of them and the radio sprang back to like.
Anyway, with the radio that I was using dead in the water, I decided to switch over and get out the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio, and finish the activation with it. Luckily, it was still in the truck from the last time I had used it before the trip. This just goes to show that you should always carry a back up. Lol. This took almost 15 minutes to sort out ultimately and I have a big skip in my logbook because of it, but I was able to get back on the air, on the same frequency as well, and finish the activation getting almost 40 contacts in the logbook before I went QRT.
Once I finished the activation it had also pretty much stopped raining as well so I got out the camera and got some photos of the gorge as well. This park is a real treat and if you have a decent cardio regimen, then taking the stairs down to the cable bridge is a treat, but be warned, the climb out is legit strenuous and is not for the non-athletic individual. You can get yourself into trouble here if you don’t heed the warning signs posted at the top of the stairs.
My favorite camera ever is the Leica SL2 and on this day it is sporting the 24-90mm zoom lens. I chose it because of the zoom as well as the fact that it is weather sealed so I can get it out in the rain without fear of it being damaged.
Below are a few photos I took while hiking down and out to the bridge, sometimes people will do the silliest things… lol.
Hope you enjoyed the extra photos of Tallulah Gorge at the end, I enjoyed capturing them. Until next time, 73.
WK4DS