The rover award is when you activate at least 5 parks in one UTC day.
My final location of the day, Booker T Washington State Park K-2933 and it worked wonderfully!
I have been interested in this whole “rover” thing for a while now. So I finally dug into the rules so I would know what is required and laid out a plan. I found 5 parks that I could access easily and set out a route to them and just loaded down the truck with gear in anticipation of needing backup stuff. I didnt need it, but I had it. Like what you see here is three radios. The TR-35 (which is what I used for most of the day), the Icom IC-705, and the Elecraft K1 makes for a strong QRP expedition.
Anyway, so I figure I would start with my local park since I know where the parking lot is and the proximity to the main road is really good. I chose the Sitton Gulch parking lot at the bottom of the mountain because of the main road noted above and the fact that I have had great luck here in the past.
I got the activation, plus a few more contacts than I needed, in about 20 minutes of air time. Not a bad start! Well, I got excited once I cleared the pileup and had the activation in the bag and completely forgot to get a photo of the truck here. I realized it at the next park… If you want to know what that looks like, just read this blog post K-2169 POTA Activation at the very foot of a MOUNTAIN - AAR. It has a few photos of this parking area and I was in that lot.
I wanted to make sure I had enough time to activate each of the five parks AND not leave people calling if at all possible. Since I am using QRP power, this should not be a problem though and I normally dont get more than four or five calling me at once with two being the norm for me. Basically, pile ups are small for me. So I wanted to shave time off of the other parts to leave more time for “ON AIR” activities. Below is a quick photo of the cab of the truck showing how I left the gear when changing parks.
I just left the TR-35 connected and laid it on the dash to where it would not slide off and broke down the antenna by just removing the hamstick and disconnecting the coax. Then I put the yellow mount with the radials still attached in the truck bed ever so carefully and rolled the coax into the back seat and I was off. This made park changes really fast since I was sticking with 20 meters for this trip as I had good confidence that I could get the activations with just that band pretty quickly.
The next stop was the Zahnd WMA, which to be honest, I had never heard of till I started looking at doing a Rover. It is literally next to the road so it was in and out with a cleared little pileup and on I went. Below is what the parking area at the WMA looks like, it is actually really nice for a WMA parking lot. I had the place to myself since nothing is in season right now. Something else of note is that when I was working the early parks, I would cross 10 QSOs and then once I worked all the callers, I would go QRT and move, but once I got K-0716 activated I started getting comfortable with achieving the goal and would call CQ longer. For now though, as you can see below, 10 contacts (and just a few more) and I was off to the next location.
So the next location was about 10 miles down the road. I have activated Otting WMA before so I knew what to expect when I got here. The parking are is also right by the highway (which is why I chose this route to be honest) so access time is minimal.
You will notice I back into the parking location as much as possible to get the antenna out of the way so people and pets do not wander into it while I am transmitting.
Deploying the system involves, backing into a location to get my antenna out of the way and then opening the bed cover, installing the yellow antenna mount, laying the two radials out, then screwing in the radiator. Next I open the rear truck door, grab the coax and plug it into the antenna mount. A couple minutes arranging the cab, while listening to the band for an opening then I spot myself on the website and were off to the races. Below is the info kiosk at Otting, all these WMAs seem to have one now which is nice so I can see if there is a managed hunt or what.
Something else I like about the rover idea is there is a lot of driving in the country here. I passed through the town of Menlo GA between parks 3&4 and stopped to grab a couple of photographs. Some with my camera and some with my phone. Small town America is cool…
So for my next stop, I went to the Chickamauga national military Park, which is K-0716 and set up in the parking lot of what is known as the “tower” by the locals. It is actually known as Wilder tower and is a really common attraction in the park.
I backed into the space, even though they are angled in such a way as to promote pulling into them so this took a minute, but that allowed me to spread my radials in the grass strip between the parking space and the road. I have found that getting the radials out of the way of other people so they don’t trip over them is critical and backing into the parking spaces normally allows this. Another thing of note is do not transmit when there are people that can touch the radials as even at QRP power levels, there is enough RF energy on the radials to shock someone ever so slightly so the smart thing to do is not transmit while people are around your antenna. I had to be very mindful of the other people in the park while I did this particular activation, as I did not set up in my usual spot where there are very few people. In hindsight, I should have just used the usual spot as it is out of the way, and most people do not ever bother going there. Another thing to note is that by this point in the trip, I had gotten good at setting up and breaking down the antenna and radio to move to the next park. I knew exactly what I needed to do to get the radio in a position to where I could just set it out of the way and move to the next location without having to do a bunch of unnecessary, connecting and reconnecting of wires.
Once I got to this park, I realized how much time I still had and I decided to work contacts for a little longer here. I still continued to use 20 meters only because I did not want to get too comfortable with band changes and getting out additional equipment until I got to the fifth park. This park was actually fairly busy with people coming to see the tower, jogging and walking their dogs. Seeing this helped me to decide to keep the extra gear put away as well and figured I would play with the other bands once I got to the last park. I also knew the area at the last park pretty well and knew I would not have to worry about kids and pets getting into my antenna there.
As you can see though, I had a good run of a little pileup and it took me about 35 minutes to clear it. Once it was clear and I took a call from Teresa to sort out some shop problems, I was off to the last park of the day, K-2933. This has been one of my easy parks that if I am in the north east portion of Chattanooga that I can get to and have a nice quiet activation. so I go by there every month or so. I will probably get my repeat offender award for it at some point this summer.
Here is the storage tube I put together out of 2” PVC pipe to keep my growing ham-stick collection from getting damaged when not in use. It was cheap and I didn’t even glue it together, just friction. It fits diagonally in the truck bed with almost not play so it doesn’t roll around at all. Currently I only have 4 ham-sticks in it so I have plenty of room. You can also see the spare radials for the other bands I used here today laying on the ground for band changes. Like a genius, I tuned each band with out the radials for the other bands on the base and to prevent me from having any sort of problems arising from tuned stuff in the area, I just used them like I tuned them. Of course this worked beautifully well, but it did add a little more work. I am going to make the antenna mount to where I can install four ham-sticks at once and since they have such great out of band rejections, the RF for each band should find the right antenna without having to change them out. I just need to put the whole thing together and tune it first.
Mu impromptu sunshade for the Icom IC-705 worked really well.
Another surprise for this trip was that I pressed the Icom IC-705 into service as I have not used it in a while and wanted to play with it some today. I had also brought the Elecraft K1, but just as backup incase the other two radios failed on me…lol. The IC-705 is touch screen technology so it is easy to do all sorts of things like band changes and sending from memory when calling CQ. Plus it has a built in speaker which is nice when there isn’t a lot of noise in the area. Headphones are great when I am alone, but it is hard to explain to a passerby what I am doing if they can not hear the radio too. This is one of the only oughts I have with the Penntek TR-35. It has no internal speaker…
Here is your free tip of the day, most of you probably already know this, but some of you may not. Use colored phasing tape to color code your antenna and matching radials so you know which radials go with each ham-stick or what ever antenna you decide to use. This makes putting the right kit together a simple task instead of frustrating when the SWR is acting strange because you used the wrong radials with the vertical that you have on the mount.
Now as you can see below, I started on 30 meters. I ran into a problem here though, there was some sort of broadband QRM that was spaced in intervals across the whole band space. I finally found that 10.116mhz was fairly quiet and started calling. I got 4 answers before giving up to the QRM and moving to 20 meters where I had a great time free of this pesky QRM that was down on 30 meters. After a solid run of 18 contacts on 20 meters I figured I would give 17 meters a shot before calling it a day. I had somewhere I needed to be later so I had to pack it up by 19:00 UTC. Anyway, I do the band change to 17 meters and start calling. You can see in the log that it took me about 5 minutes to do the band change and get back on the air. This is why I laid all the stuff out like I did. I wanted to make it easy to do till I can get the multi antenna system done. Well I netted another 18 QSOs on 17 before having to go QRT for the day. Total for this park FOURTY in 1 hour and 20 minutes (80 minutes). I could have probably gotten more if I had not messed with the WARC bands and just stuck to 20 meters as it was going crazy. BUT where is the fun in that? I had the activation so why not play on the other bands a little since I have the stuff?
If you see your call in the log and want to swap QSL cards, I only do paper cards and I will respond to all that I get. This was a load of fun and I think next time I will take a helper to help with logging and band changes and stuff, I went solo today and it was … quiet… at times. This makes for a great times if you don’t mind the solitude, but for some it might be a problem. I was busy all day so it didn’t bother me in the slightest. Just be aware of that.
So till next time, get your radio out!!!
72
David WK4DS