Some days are better than expected in spite of band conditions.

Well today the work was grueling and about 3PM, the wife gave me clearance to go do an activation over at K-2169 Cloudland Canyon State Park. So come 4PM I grabbed the log book out of the house and jumped into the truck for a quick activation.

Upon arrival, I was all by myself in the upper parking lot. Wonderful as I can choose any spot I want to keep the sun out of my eyes and back the truck up next to the grass for my counter poise wires. So I deploy the “truck-tenna” as quickly as I can and get in the cab to plug in the TR-35. I got the cab nice and warm with the heater while setting up the antenna and then shut down the truck to keep the noise to a minimum while I activate. I really like my “trick” of having a quiet and warm winter time location for POTA. So for the winter this is how I will roll… lol literally.

The solar data says it wont be a great day for POTA…

So once I got setup, I dialed around on 20 meters a little to scope out the band conditions a little before I started, but it was opened up pretty strong when I dialed through the band. So I went up to the QRP area and found a nice quiet spot, listened for a few minutes while I wrote up my logbook with the usual data for my activation and then made a fatal mistake…I sent a CQ from the keyer memory while I started to log into the POTA website so I could spot myself, but before I could get it open on my iPhone I got an answer! So things are hopping now! LOL I log him then immediately get another call, and this went on for a couple of minutes. So I finally get a chance to spot myself so I can be found on the bands…. waa waa waaaaaa… (The joke is on me here, as I think I could have easily gotten the activation by just calling cq today as good as things were going) But once the spot went up, Dear Lord the gates were opened up! I had a mini-pile up the rest of the time I was able to operate, I literally cleared the pile 1 hour later and went QRT so I could go home.

You can tell if I am in a hurry or not by how I write the time next to the QSO, if I have time, I will write the proper time signature, if not then it is just enough data to log it for me.

Some things I took away from this activation are that a 20m hamstick is not able to hear inside about 500 miles, give or take… Just take a look at the map and it is painfully obvious. But yeah, it works WONDERFULLY outside of that zone! My best QSO tonight was to Oregon with WA7RAR using 5 watts at 2064 miles, not quite the 1000 miles per watt that people want, but it was still a good QSO for me! I still have not bought the other hamsticks yet, I am going to be ordering them soon though so we can play with different bands too.

I did have a few minutes where a spammer tried to shut me down, I didn’t even catch it until I copied the call twice and realized they were just pulling my chain sending random letters with just dits… Then they moved on and I went back to filling up the logbook. Also of note is that I learned TODAY that I could add the “stroke” and special designator in HAMRS and it would take it without killing the call sign! I entered my first mobile contact in my log today. I have logged a couple in the past but didn’t know I could enter the mobile designator in HAMRS… Sorry about that to the few ops that I have not given that info to on my logs.

So for future reference, don’t let the solar data tell you that you cant make a contact when things look bad online. Just give it a shot and throw out a CQ and see what happens. So until next time, just get on the air and have some fun!

72

WK4DS

David