Moving out for POTA at US-0716

Some days are better than others…

Today saw me putting the truck in the shop to get the water pump repaired as it gave up the ghost on the interstate. It got to ride on the big truck to the mechanic and I have been driving my back up truck ever since. The old white ford is a good truck that we normally relegate to shop duty for deliveries and such but for now it is my daily driver. This also means I have to transfer all my gear over from the Dodge to the Ford and I inevitably forget some stuff. This time it was the AUX cable so that I can run my phone through the stereo…So I have been wearing my AirPods instead. I also don’t have a bed cover like on the dodge so I can’t just leave my radios on the back of the truck and have to take them in the house when I am not using them. This is mildly frustrating since I like to use my truck for a POTA wagon and just have it constantly outfitted with the gear I use.

This is what the operation center looked like today. It is nice to sit in the shade and work some contacts when it isnt too hot. I still used the antenna on the truck mount and just ran the coax out into the grass. Today saw the sBitx V3 deployed again so I could work some CW as well as FT8 quietly while other people rode bikes and enjoyed lunch in the park. I wound up sitting on the hard shell case for the Argonaut as a sort of makeshift chair and it worked really well. I also sat the radio on its hard case to raise it up as well. What POTA activation would be complete without a cup of good chain store coffee? Lol…

As you can see, the antenna worked out quite well on the old ford. I was quite happy with the results even though it was thin on total contacts. I like the fact that I can simply back into a space and setup my antenna right there in just a couple of minutes. There are times that I wished I had a better antenna but you use what you brought and have fun. I did have fun so it is all good. I do have some really good wire antennas to work with but I don’t like trying to string them up in places like this. I am almost certain that it is against some sort of rule in the national parks.

Here is an interesting note about this activation. One of those fancy-smancy Tesla cyber trucks rolled into the parking lot while I was operating and I immediately got this broadband RF hash all over me radio. When he shut the truck down, the hash disappeared and as soon as he powered it back up, it returned. So I am convinced they need better RF shielding of something. You can see it on the display on my radio above.

I am still on the fence as to whether I like the aesthetic of the Tesla Cybertruck or not. Hard to say to be honest. I do like the power availability idea that you can POTA for days from it. It is battery powered after all… Haha…once you shut it down that is…

Until then I will be using my 36Ah battery. This is a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery and is shockingly light for its size and performance. I can run literally for days on this one cell without problem. You can even run several hours at 100 watts if you wanted to… I normally have this plugged into my shack for a backup power system in the event of power failure so that some of my radios continue to work. Mainly my VHF/UHF machines so I can talk to the locals either on the repeaters or via simplex should there be some sort of emergency. On some days though, I will take it to the field with me to make some POTA contacts and this was one of those days.

31 contacts in the log is a great day for me. I had so much fun and even got a bunch of DX into the log! What more can you ask for? Nice weather, ham radio, DX, POTA…it is almost more than you can handle!!! HaHa. Thanks for following along and I hope to see you again in the next one.

72

WK4DS

Broke out the Penntek TR-35 for a change.

When you dont use a radio for a while it is almost like having a new radio…

This radio has quickly became on of my all time favorite radios. This tiny radio has everything you could ask for in a CW machine…EXCEPT for an internal antenna tuner…but I digress. In the past I have had the Elecraft K1 (a couple of times actually) which does have a tuner (both of mine had the tuner) but it was not as intuitive to use. That is why I sold it and got this one instead. It is a better radio in my opinion… Even missing the antenna tuner, I prefer this little radio to the K1, now this comes with some needed caveats as it is not really fair to compare these two radios directly. You see the K1 was design around 20 years ago and the TR-35 my more recently with much more modern technology and features. The stability of the TR-35 is uncanny compared to the K1 which would drift a little till it warmed up. Still the K1 was a wonderful machine for my needs and I used it to activate a POTA park on the island of Hawaii last year, so it is plenty capable.

Due to the weather improving I have moved the “shack” outside and setup on the bed cover to get some sun and fresh air, plus it is easier to work since I can spread out the gear somewhat.

I like these hamstick antennas so much that I am thinking about making a tripod mount for them so that I can setup at a nearby picnic table and use them with an elevated counterpoise concept… I could even get them higher above the grade this way too, possibly improving performance a little.

So this is the whole station today, the hamstick on 17 meters with a 15’ coax to the common mode choke. I put it on the nanoVNA and the resonant point was high, and I think it is from the fact that the 17 meter counterpoise wire have some broken off of them which makes them too short for a tuned circuit. But nonetheless the SWR measurement was plenty good enough to use, so I got on the air in short order. To try to compensate for this, I added the 20 meter radial that works so well for me now in the past on a bunch of bands. (I should probably measure this wire and make a new since it is getting frazzled) but it didn’t help very much today. I left it anyway as it did seem to help a little…

The operating position today… I really like using the bed cover for the operation position as it affords me the most user space I could possible imagine as well as it is simple. I have activated with this battery 3 or 4 times at this point and it is still over 13 volts!

The key for today is the Gemini travel key. This has turned out to be a wonderful little key and I am so happy to have bought it. It works so well.

As you can see from the log, I had a great day on 17 meters and even landed me a DX station! Jan was in the Netherlands when I started hearing his callsign! It was awesome that he could hear me too!!! There was some fading of course, but he could hear me! I made a good bit of notes about the activation in the log today where you can see things happening like when I lost a QSO outright to some one tuning up on top of me…for a long time… There is another note about the time when someone had a messed up car ignition that created some broad band noise and I couldn’t hear anything for a few minutes till they left.

Testing a new power pack for backpacking…

This is the idea… I think I want to do some SOTA activations after listening to K4SWL talk about them on his YouTube channel. So this means that I need a smallish radio setup to be able to do these kinds of activations. I have to be able to pack them in and out from the SUMMIT, yeah, the very tip top of a mountain…

Today’s blog post covers the idea I have for a power source. I am going to use AA batteries. I know I can buy a Bioenno battery, but this gives me the options of picking up regular alkaline batteries if need be (I plan to make a couple of aluminum dummy cells for this option so the voltage wont be too high). It also allows me to repurpose the cells for my HT radios too as I have them configured to used these batteries as well. I found these 10 cell battery holders on Amazon and ordered one to try it out. Since it hold 10 cells, the voltage is higher and gets closer to the regular battery voltage everyone uses. The cells are 1.3 VDC when charged so this adds up to just over 13 volts in this kit. I measured the pack today before the activation at 13.2VDC…Perfect for what I wanted. So I load up the new battery pack and head over to K-2169 to test out the power pack life with a POTA activation.

The above photo is an optical illusion that has to do with the shutter speed of me camera and the refresh rate of the display on the radio, to the naked eye it was not gapped like this but looked fine. This little radio is a perfect little radio for SOTA so I am going to use it for that purpose.

Here is the basic radio kit as I plan to deploy it. The headphones are smaller and lighter than my box speaker/battery pack I made. I can also hear better on headphones too so it just made sense to use these instead. These are Sony headphones if I remember right, but I could be wrong. I will also be using my little travel key I bought as it is perfect for this project…till I get the new one that I plan on in the not-to-distant future.

I also plan to use a 40m EFHW antenna for my activations and just work 40m and 20m bands with it. This is the simplest antenna setup I can come up with as it doesn’t require a tuner and is pretty small for what it can do. I might get one of the compact verticals at some point, but for now that will have to do. I will also take a piece of throw line and a throw weight as well to get the antenna into the air. I will also add a piece of coax as this is the counterpoise in most cases. Otherwise I will need a coax AND a counterpoise… so I will eliminate the counterpoise and just work off the coax shield instead. Above is the tuner I used today as it was still in the truck from the last activation and I know how good it works.

This is the beauty of using campgrounds to activate, there are plenty of tie off points for your antenna system. LOL

After working almost 50 contacts over about 2 hours with almost all of it either making a contact or sending CQs meaning there was significant battery draw over these two hours, the battery voltage had only dropped from 13.2 to 12.82VDC. A little less than .4VDC or about 3% of the pack voltage overall. That is great as this tells me that almost any hike-to activation will have plenty of power to make contacts. I dont think I will be doing SOTA where I will have more than two or three hours on the summit for radio as there is the hike to and fro that has to be factored in as well. I call this part a success.

Pro-tip to the new hams just getting going. Grab a cheapo little volt meter for a field meter. This one was only a few dollars and worked perfectly. This technology has gotten very affordable and can be a priceless tool when you need to check the continuity of a piece of coax or to see if the battery pack has voltage on it like here. It has come in handy quite a few times now and stays in my POTA kit all the time. Until next time…72

My 80th Activation of K-2169

This AAR is brought to you by… wait for it… me! Lol. But seriously, today is special for another reason or two, on this day I activated Cloudland Canyon State Park for the 80th time and I met another ham at my home park!

Today, once again I setup the truck in the lower lot like I did a while back as it is faster somewhat but also it has a different view as well. I normally don’t setup down here as I have had issues with electronic hash noise in this area (I am guessing it is coming from inverters in the campground just over the hill) so that is why I goto the top of the hill where the disc golfers are most of the time. The antenna situation today is as follows, I went ahead and installed all the radials at once as it was threatening to rain the whole time and would sprinkle on occasion during the activation regularly.

I also used my RG-316 coax today along with my rain proof “countermeasures” which consist of a peanut bag taped over the coax connector to keep it dry during the activation. This is a field expedient solve that also happens to be a way to recycle a common piece of trash that would otherwise end up in the landfill. I can even reuse the tape a couple of times if I am careful.

Since I connected all my radials today, I also tried to use the whole suite of antennas that I have currently. If you will look closely, you will se I also installed QD mounts on my hamsticks as well. This made band changes so much faster!

I figured I would start on 17 meters to see what I could hear up there. When I connected it and saw the radio, I had high hopes as the waterfall on the Icom IC-705 had several signals on it. Calling CQ almost immediately netted 2 dx contacts! I worked DL1AX in Germany and SP9RXP in Poland! Did I mention I am only using 5 watts?!?! SP9RXP is 5060 miles from K-2169 so that qualifies for the 1000 miles per watt award! One day I will actually apply for these… HIHI I attribute this entirely to the new common mode choke I made and was using and a nice little band opening that happened at the same time. The choke probably didn’t have much of an impact on this but I want to believe it did.

This choke works so much better than my other one that it isnt even a real comparison. It also seems to help with band noise, but that could just be me wanting to believe it does since I built it more than anything. I know it measures real good on the nanoVNA… lol

While I was on 20 meters this camper van rolls by real slow, I tend to get that a lot with all the radials and the hamstick on the back of the truck. Then the camper van stops right in front of me and the guy gets out and starts over my way. I also get this a lot as people are curious and want to know what I am doing. But then it takes a completely different direction when he says (I am paraphrasing a little here) “Are you doing Parks on the Air?” This caught me off guard as I had never had someone who knew what I was doing, actually ask me if that was what it was.

Turns out this camper was none other than W5DXQ on vacation! He is from Texas and is very active on the air using an assortment of modes. I was in the middle of a QSO so I asked him to let me clear it then we proceeded to talk for about 20 minutes about my rig and CW and digital modes and how he uses the spotter system and SSB and the list goes on and on. Meeting Jeff was the highlight of the activation…well that and working two dx stations right out of the gate on 17 meters… It was awesome to finally meet someone else who does POTA at a park. I am so glad he decided to stop and ask what I was doing. I hope to work him on the air at some point! Now the challenge for me is to meet someone actually activating like Jeff did when he found me today.

Once we finished our eyeball QSO he headed off on his adventure and I got back on the air. Looking at the QSO map, it looks really odd with the two european stations when compared to the North American dispersion that happened once the band opening closed on 17 meters. I normally net at least a few western states but today saw no one west of Texas.

As you can see from the logbook, today 30 and 20 meters were the bands to use but even then the reports were showing how the bands were fading in and out. I did make some contacts on all four bands though so I am super happy with that.

The peeps over at the POTA website even sent me this cool certificate to commemorate the 80th activation! Nice!

All in all, it was a great day for POTA. I hope to hear you on the air soon. 72 de WK4DS

Activating an Off-road Vehicle Area is not always a great idea.

Sometimes things look better on paper…

But in execution, they are not a great ideas.

This is the story of me (WK4DS) at K-5493 Franklin-Marion State Forest.

On my way over to the park, I passed through South Pittsburg, Tennessee to shoot a little photography first since it was on the way to the top of the mountain to do an activation…

When I arrived at the park location I liked, it was perfect weather and quiet and as you see from the photo, I had the place all to myself. Well, that changed in about 15 minutes from the time I took this photo. You see, this “park” on the POTA map is actually a state forest with OHV trails on it. I parked in a clearing that is about 100 yards off of the paved road and is next to an old forest service fire tower. The luxury to this site is that it is literally on top of the mountain and 100 yards of gravel road from the pavement. So I have a great elevation profile because of that and easy access to a good site.

This is an old forest service fire tower. It was on the other side of the clearing and is so old that it had trees growing through the framework and the building at the top had no floor in it anymore. I remember these in use as a kid, but at some point they stopped using them, and from the looks of this one, it was probably in the 90s. There was another feature that I noticed as well… Have a look at the photo below and take a guess what made all those holes…

I cant go up there and see, but I am pretty certain those are bullet holes. That is one thing that “rednecks” are good for, shooting things like this… I don’t know where this mindset comes from, but they tend to do things like this. It is unfortunate too as this is basically destroying relics from our local history for simple entertainment.

Another thing that I ran into on this trip was that the little adapter shown below that goes on my headphones has failed. It was causing some heavy shorting issues and I ended up figuring out that if I spun it to the right position it would not cause a problem, but spin it just a little and it would make terrible feedback. I didn’t have a spare either so I ended up using it and just being super careful with it…Always have a spare is the lesson here.

In the photo below you can see what I am talking about when I say there were ATVs going by while I was operating. Lots of ATVs would pass through at times, like 4 to 6 in a group at once. These vehicles also don’t have great mufflers either so it would be hard to hear while they were going by…

Since it was nice weather, I wanted to use the truck bed cover for my operating position and because of this, I was right next to the antenna. Also if you will notice, there was a couple more hamstick antennas this time. I picked up a 17m, 30m, and a 40m Shark brand hamsticks from Chatt Radio and spent the morning before the activation today tuning the 17 and 40m antennas. I didn’t do the 30m unit yet because I ran out of time as I wanted to try an activation today and I still had to make all the parts for the radials for the 30m antenna from scratch… Once I got the 17m radials made and tuned and then cobbled my 40m hamstick radials together so it would work (I think I need to revisit this one at some point and make better radials for it), I was off to the races! This design of antenna and mount work extremely well for their size.

Today’s weapon of choice is the Penntek TR-35. This radio has everything you need and nothing you don’t. It is just a great little CW rig that is simple to use and works really well.

This is a close up of my 17meter radial tie down, that I dubbed “Gen 2”, ground weight design. I can remove the weight easily from this plastic connection plate and use it on a different radial if I wanted to change bands or something like that. This worked really well and was easy to setup and tear down too. My old design coupled the weight to the radial making it a dedicated weight, which is simpler to make, but not as versatile to use as the weight is part of the radial.

Below is the complete antenna kit as of today. This doesn’t show the mounting bracket that I made to install these on, you know the big yellow one, right? But here are the radials and antennas that I currently have tuned and are ready to get on the air. Once I get time to work on the 30m antenna, I will add it to the stable. The ham-stick is a very viable option for the QRP POTA op. I used these today to get the contacts below and you can see that the signal reports show it works just fine. If you have one, this is something that I suggest you try to use. They need the radials though to get the best performance. I have found that is important. Supposedly they are designed to not need them, using the coax as the counterpoise but they just get out so much better with them tuned to the band with a proper counterpoise.

If you will notice, I make lots of notes as I go in my log, but I had a great day on all three bands. It was cool to get some contacts on 17 and 40 meters today, but if you will notice, all the magic happens on 20 meters… That is where the bulk of my contacts happened today. I also was able to work the same ops on multiple bands which is kind of cool.

So even if you run into problems with the location like I did, just get the radio out anyway as it just might be the day you put over 70 QSOs in the log! So till next week, get that radio out and throw a wire up into a tree!!!

A super cold (for me) POTA CW ham radio activation

Well today was super cold to me after spending a month in central Florida. It was 29 degrees and the wind was howling at park K-2169 (Cloudland Canyon) back in NW Georgia!!! I didn’t let that stop the ham radio bug in me from getting out in the cold and activating a POTA site!

I thought to grab a selfie to remind me of how dumb I was to get out in this cold weather so maybe I would think better of it in the future…probably not, but it was worth a try. You can see how I have the door open on the truck, I was using it for a wind break to keep the crazy gusting winds from freezing me solid with wind chill. That is why I logged in the back seat instead of on top of the bed cover which is my preferred location if I am using the truck for ops.

The weapon of choice today? The Elecraft K1 (4 band version with 40, 30, 20, &17) My particular machine also has the internal antenna tuner as well. I guess you could say it has everything other than the internal battery. This is my second copy of this tiny machine, but I have had a long love affair with these little radios. I sold the first one and literally missed it the day i shipped it off. It only took me a few years to find another one like the first one and get my little grubby paws on it…this time for keeps. Of all my QRP rigs, I place this one VERY near the top.

In the photo below we see the Elecraft K1 as seen from the top, I have placed the BNC to screw lug device on the antenna output of the radio and connected the antenna and counter poise directly to the radio with no feedline at all. I did this on purpose to test the system like this for a upcoming project I want to use this radio for in this configuration. This allows me to see how effective it is with a very minimalist rigging. I am wanting the whole thing to be as minimal as possible and still reach the west coast if possible. You see, I have a week in Hawaii and by the time you read this, I should have been there and returned with at least one activation from the Big Island of Hawaii under my belt… only time with tell.

The below photo shows how I took the tension off of the radio with the wire antenna once I strung it up into the tree next to the truck. This is a modified version of a knot we used in the Boyscouts called a taught line hitch. It works REALLY well on tent ropes for tensioning them to the stakes, it also works really well for tying a small cord to the antenna wire to make it to where you can tie it off to something near the radio as well. If you look above at the photo of the front of the radio, you can see the other end of the cord tied to the top cover ring on my bed cover. This end of the cord is tied to the truck with a bowline knot so it can be undone easily when I finish the activation.

Below is the only photo I have ever been able to get of the wire itself and it actually show up in the photo well enough to be meaningful. I threw a line up into the tree and pulled this wire up about 25 feet off the ground with the throw line and it worked really well. I know this is really low for a wire this long, but I was frozen and in a hurry and didnt want to rethrow the line to try and get it higher in the tree. So I used what I had.

OK, so here is the part where I talk about the antenna that I used. This antenna is simply a random wire right at 41 feet long and the counter poise is 13’ long. These are technically not supposed to be resonant on any of the 4 bands I have in this radio, but as it turned out today, the antenna was almost perfect on the 40 meter band with it arranged near the truck body. (it was reacting capacitively with the truck as I could change the SWR by literally moving the counter poise closer or further from the truck. It would also change the resonance of the antenna too, so I used the internal tuner to be safe) I used this to my advantage and worked quite a few 40 meter contacts today. I also cut counter poise wires for the other three bands and plan to set them up and see what the nanoVNA says about them when I have time. Something else I have learned to do over time is to put the wire length flags on the wires. This is simply little pieces of paper with a large number written in sharpie on them and then taped on with a long piece of packing tape to basically laminate them into place. This makes it really easy to know which wires you have without having to guess. All of this wire is high flex, silicone insulated wire and is basically tangle free for the most part, where has this wire been all my life??? Turns out it was on Amazon all along…

Another item I have fallen in love with is these little Velcro cable straps, I don’t know why I didn’t get these sooner, but these things are a wonder of modern technology for wire management and keeping your gear organized. If you have never used them, I highly recommend grabbing a pack of them off of amazon, it will change your life!

So, since I had a way to wander off of 20 meters, wandered I did! I didnt get on 20 meters at all today. Today I stayed on the other three ham radio bands that I could get on and got 16 contacts in about 45 minutes even though it was super cold and I had the power, on the first two QSOs, turned down to 1 watt! Yes, ONE watt! Now, they are only a few hundred miles away to be fair, but still, it is a single solitary watt going the distance here! AA5JF was a little over 200 miles from me and he heard me really well if his signal report is accurate on that little single watt of RF power. The other person (W4EDN) was 265 miles away and I still got a good report. This just goes to show that you don’t need really big guns to have some fun with radio, it is something that even people who can only get small QRP kit rigs and build them can make some contacts. Now, would have I made more with more power? Of course I would, more people could have heard me and I am not contesting that. My point here is people seem to get it in their head that you need 100 watts to be able to have a QSO on HF, when it just ain’t true. Now, I cant speak of phone contacts here as I don’t do very much HF amateur radio on phone modes, I am almost exclusively a CW op…hence the love affair with the K1. So take all that with a grain of Morse code… Once I remembered I was running 1 watt, I noted it at the top of the log and turned up the power to 7 watts (I thoguht I would see how the signal reports changed with 7 times the output power and the log speaks for itself. The first report on each line is what I sent them and the second report is how they heard me. Once I moved to 17 meters I turned the little K1 to 5 watts and left it there for the rest of the activation.

It was easier for me to get some Park to Park QSOs today with the “hunt and pounce” method…but it was more like the “hunt and wait till they can hear me” method actually, all the joking aside, it worked and I got three parks in the log today because of it. I didn’t keep the activation going any longer as I had some chores to do as well as my feet and fingers were getting numb. Numb fingers and toes makes it hard to log and send decent code so I went QRT with 16 QSOs in the logbook for today. All in all, it was a successful trip with me testing all three of the other bands I don’t normally use and the random wire turned out to even be resonant on the 40 meter CW band somehow. What luck! Maybe future me will have written about how my trip to Hawaii was successful and you will see that blogpost in a couple of weeks once I have had time to write it. So till next time, go get your radio out and take it to a part or something.