This park is the second nearest park to me past US-2169. Since it is a further drive, I tend to not activate it as much. This weekend I was able to actually activate it in both states in two consecutive days.
As you can see above, the band was really active on CW as well as FT8 on this day at Eagle’s Nest and I made quite a few contacts in the mid afternoon here. When I setup here, I am right on the edge of the road so I have a lot of road noise to contend with here. I ended up going to earphones when I operated CW just so I could hear when cars would go by. That was OK though as I could hear plenty well enough to get a bunch of QSOs in the log before switching over to FT8 for a while.
Yours truly next to the sign for this location and the below picture shows where the truck is located in comparison to the road as viewed from the sign. There is an upper parking area too but the spot where I parked today is fully inside the park so I simply setup here if I don’t have a lot of time.
I quickly ran the radials out into the weeds and checked the antenna system on the nanoVNA and it was close enough to use (I think it was 1.5:1 SWR or something near that). I really thought I would simply get 12 QSOs in the log and move on today as the bands have not really been the best lately, but that was not what happened at all!
Getting on FT8 after a strong run on the CW portion of the band was fun as well! I am really starting to enjoy this whole concept of multiple modes in a single activation.
The next day saw me wanting to activate the Georgia side of the park as I again had some free time in the afternoon. Well, let’s do it then. I strike out to the battlefield and when I get there, my usual spot is completely clear! I am stoked! I back into the tiny parking lot (it only has two spaces for some reason) and get the radio setup in short order. Well, this is where the problems start. I power up the radio and there is this broadband noise that is wiping out the band now! I investigate it for a minute and realize they have one of those huge temporary LED road signs setup across the road. This has to be the problem because there is literally nothing in any direction for over a mile easily. Well drat. I decide to expediently break down the radio to the point that the radials are rolled up and laid in the truck bed and the antenna is just stuck in the bed with the radials and I left the antenna mount on the truck hitch.
This is the culprit as best as I can tell. It is the only thing that was in the area for probably a mile in any direction that was not there the last time I activated this spot. Have any of you ever had this sort of problem with these signs?
So I move down the road about a mile or so and then take a side road out to a pull off next to a field with a bunch of monuments in it and as a bonus, it was also in the shade! These bicycles were about the loudest thing to go by while I was there too. A couple of cars did go by, but they go MUCH slower on this little one lane road since it also has the bicyclers to watch out for.
Getting to operate in the shade is kind of a special thing for me as I dont usually have a setup that allows for that.
And this is what the band scope looked like with me in a new location. Nice and quiet. There was a disturbance in the bands today though as I had a K index of 3 and it was not near as easy to get enough contacts today as it was the day before on the ham radio… In the photo I am working AF4DN on FT8 on the sBitx V3 and it was about to dry up for FT8 contacts.
Once I finished the FT8 portion of the activation, I wanted to use the Ten Tec Argonaut V radio so I switched them out and got it on the air. In the photo you can see that I was on 14.050 mhz, but the logbook shows 14.051 mhz. This because I was calling CQ and after a couple of minutes I heard someone tune up on my frequency and then they started calling CQ… Rather than get upset, I simply spun the dial a little, called QRL (Is the Frequency in use?), and then started calling CQ again. It took a while but I finally worked a half a dozen contacts on CW and at that point I had cleared all the callers I could hear and decided to go QRT and get something to eat.
This is one thing about the Argonaut V that I really like. This radio has a good ole S meter! I love to have a real meter movement if it is feasible to do so. Several of my radios do not have this features and I miss it. My old Ten Tec Omni 6+ and my Ten Tec Omni 7 both have S meters, although the Omni 7 has a digital bar-graph style on the digital display and not a physical meter, it is still there and does give you some sort of indication of the signal strength.
The operating position is starting to get very comfortable to be quite honest about it. I am starting to like operating from the truck more and more. The first year I worked many of my activations from a picnic table in the park and I had to carry all my stuff across the park to the table and back every time. This was not too bad, but it sure is convenient when you can simply setup in the truck cab in just minutes and I can even operate in the rain in this position without much problem, so rainy day activations are a thing for me now.
Two things of note about these last two photos that are of interest to me and maybe you too. The first one is that I have worked W7RF (#14 in the logbook) and this might not mean anything to you, but he is the inventor of the keyer I was using in this activation! He owns Hamgadgets.com and I love his Picokeyer CW memory keyers! I thought I recognized his call and when I ran it through QRZ, I knew I have to email him and send him a photo. he wrote me back and we had a great little exchange over it, turns out he is an avid POTA hunter as well as many other things. I count it as special to have him in my log. The bottom photo shows the parking lot I was at when I started this blog post today. It is also where I apparently left my storage case for my radials with half of the radials and ground weights still in it! I went to breakdown the system at the other location and could not find the storage case. So I packed it up and drove back over to the original spot and there it was, still sitting in the grass right where I left it… What a day.
