Raccoon creek WMA POTA with the sBitx V3 SDR transceiver

Today saw me head over to Alabama to activate a nearby park that I have never been to before. Us-9875 Raccoon Creek Wildlife Management Area is a beautiful place right on the Tennessee river between Stevenson Alabama and Flat Rock Alabama.

I drive over to the WMA and find no one there at all, this is awesome as I like it when I have the place to myself. It gives me the freedom to setup the radio anywhere or in any manner I choose without having to worry about people walking into the radials or anything like that. Well, I get there and promptly decide to setup on 20 meters as I wanted to not spend a lot of time today activating as I wanted to also record a YouTube video for our brand new channel about amateur radio as well as have time to enter and upload the log from today and edit the video once I got back home.

If you want to see the video I made when I did this activation, the link is here. I didn’t film the whole activation, but rather pulled segments in and just did some of it, so you might be in it and you might not…lol. If people want the whole activation recorded in all it’s lengthy glory, I am not opposed to doing that, but I will need to hear that from the people…

When I want to do FT8 in the field I always grab this radio. The sBitx V3 is an SDR that is built around a Raspberry Pi SBC and uses a touchscreen for most functions. It only has two input devices on the radio, the VFO knob which never changes and the multi-function knob which literally can be used to adjust everything else…literally. It does have ports for a CW key, headphones, and a microphone on the side right above the power switch too. Since it uses a RPi4, it can be driven with a mouse and keyboard and during this activation I use the mouse to select FT8 stations to call. It is really handy for that. I find that if I am simply entering a call sign to chase on FT* I can use the built in keyboard instead of taking a separate keyboard. Another thing it has is Bluetooth, so Bluetooth devices will work on it too…such as a keyboard… I really like this radio if you have not figured that out yet.

Propagation was all over the place today as you can see on the beacon report above that I was weak at -19dB into “3” land but just a half hour earlier I was able to work JI3MJK in Japan! That is almost 7000 miles away!!! So if your activating and it seems like no one can hear you and you are about to give up, I would recommend that you give it another half hour, if possible, as the system might flip in your favor! That is what happened today.

I grabbed this photo below of the screen during boot up, it shows the OS version which is JJ’s 64 bit version 3.025 and that it knows who I am and where I have set the GRID to. This is important if you are doing POTA as you need to communicate that when you work FT8 at some distant location. The FT8 community is really into grids and want to collect them all…so pay attention to your grid. It is also showing the FT8 stations as they come in as well below that in green letters. Fortunately, it is really easy to change the grid on the sBitx so you dont have to worry too much about it.

So I setup in the truck and to be honest about it, I am really starting to like this concept. I am in the shade for the most part, if I am running FT8 only, I can run the engine and have AIR CONDITIONING at my POTA operation!!! Can we say WINNING!!! Ha Ha… I have done that once so far when I was in Florida if memory serves me but I would have to check. Using CW is a little tougher though. The diesel engine is loud enough to make copy of weak stations really hard so I don’t run it if I am working CW.

I normally try to work some CW though as I really love the mode so I normally will roll down all the windows in the summer and put my windshield sun protector in the window and work a bunch of those CW ops if the bands permit it.

A neat little addendum to the sBitx radio is that since it is driven by a Raspberry Pi 4, it can use a mouse and keyboard if you prefer it. Supposedly it has keyboard CW character generation too, but I have not attempted to do that yet. So if you are not able to send very well, this might be a solution for you. The mouse makes it much easier to choose stations that are calling CQ so you can pick them out on your end and you are not obligated to just call and answer CQ calls yourself. Farhan put a lot of thought into this radio and it shows.

Here is a little discussed subject…extra gear. I know we all take it with us but what do you normally carry with you when you go into the field? I have done POTA long enough now that I have sorted it out to just what I need and some redundant spares of failure prone items. Things like extra coax and another antenna are always in the spare tote.

The location that I setup at did have a really nice view of the river. This location is right next to the John Snodgrass bridge. This is the bridge over the river for Alabama Highway 117 to Stevenson.

As you can see from the logbook, there was a great run on 20 meters CW then another great run on FT8 as well! I even netted a J call on FT8! What a great day to do radio and the weather was great to boot.

Classic CW Activation!!! Ten Tec Argonaut V for the win!

I don’t know if you have a favorite radio or not, but I do. The Ten Tec Argonaut V is one of my all time favorite portable CW rigs and for good reason! This radio brings all that is CW and Ten Tec together in the perfect combination of fun and ease of use.

Of course, this radio also has several other modes (although I could not tell you all of them as I have never switched it off of CW) but it will do other modes as well. All that said, it is a wonderful little CW machine and the ergonomics for use with CW show through in the design of the radio. From the minimalist layout to the proper location of critical operating controls, this radio is just about perfect. The only other thing that would make this radio even better would be the inclusion of Collins mechanical filters in the IF..but I digress… (Giving a quick nod to my Omni 7).

You see, when you’re activating a park with a small CW radio, you only need a few controls to be able to work the contacts coming in. The main two being the RIT for stations that are off your beat frequency by more than is comfortable (I had one of these today) and the filter bandwidth adjustment. These are the same knob on the Argonaut 5 and it is a simple button press to switch between these two functions. Another point to consider is these buttons are grouped near each other too so you are not searching all over the radio for the controls you need to work your activation. Along with these two controls the only other one I use while activating is the volume to bring down strong signals and it is also right next to the other controls, keeping the process really clean for me. Honestly the radio seems to be laid out with the “set-n-forget” stuff on the left side and the “active-use-while-operating” controls on the right now that I look at it.

Enough of me gushing on about the radio, we all know that I love this little machine…So onto the key and keyer. The key is my N3ZN travel key and it is fed into a HamGadgets Picokeyer both which are wonderful devices and work exceedingly well with the Ten Tec Argonaut V amateur radio. It has been a while since I have used the Hamgadgets Picokeyer so I had to get out the owners manual to see how to change one of the settings. Taking copies of the manuals is something I am a huge proponent of as it just makes sense. Without this book I would have been searching online, and sometimes that is not available at a park. The paper book never has a “dead battery” and is always ready to serve you. Take copies of the books with you…

A good cup of coffee is crucial to a good activation!

I went to my old haunt today US-2169 to get on the air and work some CW contacts as the space weather showed that the sun was still being friendly. I get to the park and find that it is starting to rain so I hurriedly setup my hamstick for 20 meters (I didn’t want to change bands alot with it raining…) and threw some electrical tape on the coax connector for a temporary rain jacket and got back in the truck. Pro-tip about electrical tape, turn it around backwards with the sticky side out and twist the end of the tape so it is easy to grab and unwind later if you don’t want the adhesive sticking to your parts. Things like the putting it on the coax connector as a temporarily rain shield is the perfect application for this idea. When you are done just unwind the tape and put it in the trash.

I had setup a new radial field design today as an experiment to see if adding a really long radial would work (or even help) and was pleasantly surprised to find it did! I really love using the nanoVNA to measure my antenna instead of a simple SWR meter, even though today I used the SWR function instead of the smith chart.

The power of the smith chart can not be overstated either. What you get to see on the smith chart is the data that the SWR plot shows (well, it shows the impedance and you have to know a little math to turn it into SWR) and is also shows you if your system is capacitive, inductive or purely resistive (the best option if you get to pick). Now this doesn’t mean your signal is going to get out to some distant DX station super well just because the SWR is 1:1, but your transceiver wont have to deal with reflected signals coming back down the line out of phase with the transmitted signal. I was a ham for way to long before I learned the power of the smith chart…and I have just scratched the surface of what can be done with it. All that to say that 1.061:1 is a great SWR for a field deployed antenna…lol

Just for fun I decided to look and see what the SSB segment would be since I tuned this antenna to center frequency on the CW portion and it is still good in this configuration. Dont let any SWR reading below 2:1 scare you, all radios are designed to be able to work into at least that much SWR as EEs (Electrical Engineers - the guys who actually design radios) know that these devices are going to end up in not-so-perfect applications and want them to work anyway.

The measurements, roughly, for these radials are 14’6” and 26’ respectively and they are laid out with the shorter one being 90 degrees to the truck. This is the position that I tuned the antenna at, with this radial as well as it’s mate running out the other side 180 degrees out from this one.

The 26’ radial is run pretty much away from the truck to the rear and it gets the benefit of running down the slope too. This angle adjusts the impedance of the antenna by changing the reactance. This is why discone antennas have the ground plane at 45 degrees sloping down, it presents a near perfect impedance to the transceiver. I will repeat this setup on my next trip and put the smith chart on it to see what it says about the system, I am curious to know now…

I keep this Ultra Picokeyer from Hamgadgets and the N3ZN portable CW key with the Argonaut V so every time I use this radio, I will have a memory keyer and nice paddle to operate it with. It had been a hot minute since I had used the Ultra Picokeyer so I needed to get the manual out for it. Seems for some reason last time I used it, I had enabled the internal tone (for use as a practice oscillator) and wanted to silence it for the activation. I knew how to get into the menu, but I didn’t remember the item name specifically, so out comes the book…

I can not stress how important it is to me to have the manuals to the devices I am using, stored with the kit. The only exception is when the device is so simple and intuitive that you don’t need one anyway (like with the Penntek TR-35 transceiver). So I keep home-made copies of manuals to both the Ultra Picokeyer and the Ten Tec Argonaut V transceiver in the hard shell case with them. They have saved me a couple of times already. Me and my friend KG4WBI (Roger) have this obsession with printing the manuals and then building them into these term paper booklets so we will have them later, I have so many manuals at this point, I have manuals for radios I no longer own…lol.

The 20 meter band was actually really good today. There is supposed to be significant solar problems right now as a problematic sunspot is pointing our way but I was graced with a little time to get on the air and was greeted with quite a few hunters to my surprise! As you can see in the beacon report below I was getting into New Hampshire quite well!

Some observations from today that I noticed were that I was getting states that I shouldn’t have been hearing… States like Alabama, North Carolina and even GEORGIA! I don’t ever get this kind of NVIS operation on 20 meters, I usually have to go to 40 meters to see this sort of thing happen.

Another thing was I was getting some pretty heavy QSB (fading of the signal) at times as well. The QSB even seemed to come and go which was normal to be honest for this sort of thing, but what made it unusual for me today was how deep it was. 599 signals would just disappear for 2 seconds the fade back in. Deep…

Fortunately I was able to get all the information for my log. There was a significant amount of US ops only on this day too. I figured there would be a few more Canadians as well but I only worked one on this day . It is always great to get some of our friends to the North in the log.

The diversity in the log spread today can not be understated. I was blown away with all those southern states coming back to me. Strange conditions for sure, maybe the new radial idea improved NVIS, maybe they have always been able to hear me and when I would activate there just wasn’t anyone hunting… I don’t know, but today they were there and I was stoked! Thanks for coming along and I hope to see you in the comments below.

WK4DS

K-6307 Herky Huffman/ Bull Creek WMA Activation AAR

This was a spontaneous activation of sorts… we went from Melbourne FL to basically Tampa today and on the way I had about an hour to get in a quick POTA activation. So I get on the app and start looking for parks along the way.

So I decided to go to K-6307 Herky Huffman WMA and I chose this one on purpose as it is literally across the street from another POTA park K-6330 Triple N Ranch WMA and on the map there is a road into Triple N Ranch less than 1/4 mile from the parking area at K-6307 so it isnt a 2fer but they are close enough that I could feasibly activate both in a short time. Just pick up the gear enough to drive down the road to the other entrance and park there to do the other park. Seemed simple enough, well it wasnt as it turns out.

The calendar was in that box you see in the above photo. It was nice to know if there was a hunt going on or not. You know to avoid bullets and such. Lol.

So off we go and immediately leave the hustle and bustle of Melbourne and it turns into farmland surrounded by wilderness all at once...or so it seems. A stark contrast to the coast for sure just a few miles away. It was kinda neat seeing the stark contrast like that actually. It just showed us how close nature really is sometimes if you want to go see it.

This is where I chose to setup today at K-6307. It is a parking area for the Herky Huffman/Bull Creek WMA and the truck is so far back next to the fence because that was in the shade. It was in the mid 80s and in the sun that gets hot pretty quick. When I did an about face from the same spot, you see the next image(below). I am standing on the shoulder of the road. This is a different POTA park…so close yet so far away.

As you can see on the above image, the road literally divides the two parks and is in neither of them so there is no way to get a 2fer here. BUT if I can gain access to both then I should be able to get a little 2 park rove instead, at least that is the idea.

Well, I drove down the road a little to the gate for Triple N Ranch and it was locked. Figures, you win some, you lose some. With that I decided to simply operate at the other park as long as possible instead. This netted almost 40 QSOs into the log which is awesome! The hamstick really is a great portable antenna for ops such as this where time is kinda short and deployment would be tough for a wire antenna as the underbrush here is really sharp…

Once I had a spot picked I had to move the truck back and fourth a little to get the antenna in a spot where it didnt touch any tree branches so I could radiate as good as possible. Especially since it is near the tip of the antenna and that is where the voltage is the highest. Also in the essence of saving time, I once again only put out one radial as this speeds up deployment a good bit and seems to net almost as good results.

Also of note is that we were in transit between two towns here as well so Teresa decided to simply take a nap in the truck while I operated from the bed cover. That is a luxury of CW that voice modes do not enjoy, quiet operation in low noise areas.

Below you can just see the radial running away from the truck and wait till you see the QSO map of how well it works!

Here is the operating position for this activation, the bed cover. If you will notice, you don’t see the battery. This is because I am powering the rig from a power cord I made up and put in the cab for winter ops. It is wired straight to the batteries with a fuse and powerpoles. It is just long enough to reach the bed cover if I set the radio in this location. Pretty smooth if you ask me. Lol. I like to spread the stuff out if I have room so I don’t bump a knob or something. The only knob I typically use once I setup on a frequency is the multifunction knob for RIT control occasionally. I adjust CW speed these days on the picokeyer so that is lifted from the radio too. Super simple operating procedure to be honest.

This is what it looks like to have decent band conditions, a 15 watt transmitter, and a 20 meter hamstick with a tuned counterpoise radial attached to it. This is a good day in my book. This happened in just under an hour too so not too shabby if you ask me. I had a good time so that is all that matters to me. LOL.

Once my time had ran out, I called QRT and we headed on down the road to our next location for the night. All in all it was a great day for POTA even thought I couldn’t net two parks in one day. It just means I need to return to the other park now to activate it…that is a great excuse to go to Florida! Until next time, I will look for you on the bands!

72

de WK4DS - David

Activated a new-to-me park today! K-3958

Today was a good day for POTA. I activated North Chickamauga Creek Wildlife Management Area and it was fun! You see, for me to get 80 QSOs in one outing recorded into the log is a feat of the airwaves, so that made this trip one for the books!

K-3958 is also just outside of Soddy Daisy Tennessee at the foot of Mobray mountain. I was concerned when I chose this park that I would have trouble securing the activation as this parking area is right at the base of the previously mentioned mountain. I decided to give it a shot anyway though since I have had great activations at Cloudland in a similar scenario. This WMA is also situated is a gorge and goes right up to the side of the road, the problem is unlike K-0716 on the north end of Lookout mtn where there is a pulloff, this park doesn’t have one on the road. This means my only shot at activating this park today was to find a spot inside the actual parking area itself.

So I roll into the parking lot and start looking for a space that would be suitable for setting up a station out of the truck. I quickly realized that since it was Saturday and near town that it was a popular “waterpark” for the local youth. The lot was almost COMPLETELY full with only a few spaces that were not suitable for most cars. Since I drive a huge 4x4 truck though, this problem posed little challenge for me. I soon found the spot you see in the photos and got started building a radio station. I had just enough room to fit into this space too as you see here, the truck just did clear the trees.

Well, this was kinda tough as to get out of the road, I had to back right up to the bushes. So here I am, bushwhacking my way around the back of the truck as I get out the mount, antennas and run a coax to the cab of the truck. I ran the station from the front seat today in an effort to keep dust under control as the road is literally 7 feet away and is gravel. Compound this with people driving pretty fast as well and it was fairly dusty at times. This was the main reason for giving up on the outside station idea today.

Once setup, I start considering my plan, I figured that I would start on 20 meters so I could be sure to get enough QSOs to secure the activation as the spot page showed a disproportionate amount of activity on this band. Well, let me tell you that my fears about not being able to make contact from this location were completely unfounded. This location could hear just fine. I setup on 20 meters and start calling CQ and it didnt take long at all to get a run of contacts in the log that secured the activation! After that they just kept going and going and going!

Parking is kinda tough here, you have to get the right spot for POTA and on a nice Saturday, this lot is FULL, I recommend coming through the week so there is more room.

This is what the parking lot looked like. Just cars pulled out of the way of moving traffic on the side of the road for the most part. Some spaces were built into the tree line like where I parked and then a ton were like this photo above. Almost all of them had cars in them too. The ones in the trees that were open also normally has something that made a car being there a bad idea, like mine had this huge rock in it but I had enough ground clearance to fit anyway so it all worked out

Today’s weapon of choice was the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 feeding into my hamstick collection. This is one of my all time favorite radios even though it is larger than my other rigs. It is capable of 20 watts but I never run it that hard with 15 watts being my personal maximum output power. Today saw it running at that 15 watt level because I was thinking I needed it to get over Mobray mountain since I was setup literally right at the foot of it. Across the road from where I was setup it starts going uphill and goes straight up the side of the mountain. In my opinion, this is probably the worst possible location to setup a radio, but it worked today so I am not going to complain…

I have found that the hard shell case for the radio makes a great table to sit it on. I like to use the radio in the passenger seat when I run solo ops (which is most of the time). I like this operating position as it allows me to sit comfortably in the truck and operate. This keeps me out of the sun, and I can activate in the rain from this position as well. The Dodge arm rest in the 2005 year model is a huge flat surface too so it turns into a nice little table. Since it is vinyl upholstered, the key doesn’t move around at all on it either, making this the almost perfect work surface for my POTA fun time shenanigans! If you will notice, the window behind the radio was only slightly down. This is because I was trying to minimize the dust buildup in the truck from people flying by right in front of me, there seemed to be no shortage of fast drivers in this tight area for some reason…

Well I sat on 20 meters for about an hour and made contacts the WHOLE TIME! Wow! The hunters were out in force today!!! I made FOURTY NINE QSOs in just over an hour!!! That is awesome! I looked at the POTA page for this park and that one thing alone put me on the top five activator QSO board. It is going to be a great day for the WK4DS POTA operation…

So at this point the QSO rate had dropped off and I figured I would try 17 meters to see what I could do there. Well, there was RF in the shack on this band and this little PICO Keyer is not RF friendly…at all, if there is RF near it, it will start sending strange characters and it would do this on 17 meters today, this told me the SWR was probably a little high due to the position of the counterpoise and so I folded on 17 and went instead to 30 meters.

The nice thing about 30 meters is that it allows you to operate into areas that is only reachable by BOTH 20 and 40 meters. It is strange in that it acts like both bands for some reason. I can make long distance contacts and then the next one will be in Georgia… You just never know with 30 meters how it will work. Well today it worked REALLY well, with me making 28 QSOs on this band in about the same number of minutes. The bands were on fire today! Wow! It did get me quite a few local states as well with North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi coming into the log at this point.

The photos above show what everybody was coming to see. The river is beautiful but the water was way down with only a small stream actually running right now and that made for several pools that the people would congregate around to swim in. I found a couple of fishermen at this spot and they said they were not having any luck due to the low water levels. I grabbed a couple of quick photos and headed back to the truck…

After having such good runs on 20 and 30 meters I figured I would drop down to 40 meters and see what was going on there. Forty meters was not happy today, well at this point in the day that is. Seems that the atmosphere was not happy with my attempt at this band and only allowed me 3 QSOs before I called it quits and went QRT with 80 QSOs in the log for one day. I wrapped up the radio and antenna system and then headed home with a new park and a ton of contacts, what else do you need for a great day of radio? I will go back to this park again but next time I want to go on a week day and see what I can do with less people in the park. But until then, I hope to hear you on the air. 73 WK4DS

A POTA activation that was incredibly rewarding!!!

When we activate a park we never know what is going to happen.

So today is Labor day here in the USA. This is the first Monday in September set aside for the workers of this country to grill out with their buddies and such as that. So for me that means going out and setting up a POTA activation somewhere. I decided on Cloudland Canyon after deciding that the drive time to other parks would make the activation very short for me and I wanted more time on the air instead. I choose the upper parking lot since I wanted to use my hamstick system instead of rigging to the trees today. The trees I normally use have a lot of traffic today from hikers and I didn’t want them tripping over antenna wires all day so this just made sense. As you can see below, there was plenty of room for me here today…

I don’t know if I have shared this or not, but I have converted all of my hamsticks to this QD system so band changes are fast. It works really well, I do need to retune my antennas though as this did lengthen them a little and now they are all low on the meter for their center frequency… always something to do…lol.

Once installed, these mounts work really well and the tune is very stable, I have not seen it change at all from the numbers on the VNA since adding these QD adapters. So if you think you might want to use hamsticks for POTA, I really like them. Now to be honest, I don’t think I would use them for mobile (in motion on the roadway) use as there is a lot of leverage on this little mount and the spring is not that heavy to me, they might work fine like that and probably have been deployed that way, but for me, this is a site setup tool only.

Another reason for the hamstick setup is the use of the truck for shade during the activation. By strategic positioning of the truck I can leave the doors open with the engine off and not have RFI from the operating parts of the truck to contend with as well as having a natural shade from the sun too. I use this trick a lot when I don’t have a ton of time for an activation and want to operate in inclement weather like rain. Simple and robust, plus the system just works, look at the logbook below and tell me how hamsticks don’t work…

I carry all of the stuff in the photo below in the hard-shell case that I keep the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 in so I don’t have to search for cables or things like my key. It is all in there and I just grab the case and go. This makes life so much simpler for me. Seen in the photo is the Ham-gadgets Pico Keyer and the N3ZN tiny CW key I picked up at the Huntsville Hamfest. Once I get all the parts out of the case I close it up and use it in the passenger seat for the hard surface to place the radio on so it is out of the way while I use the center armrest for logging and sending CW.

Here you can see how simple the connection scheme is when running Hamstick antennas, there is no tuner or interconnecting cables, just the RF choke to the coax, the power cable (I plugged into the truck’s cigarette lighter port today) and the CW key cable and nothing else is needed. Simple is king here and it also makes setup fast. That is another reason I like using CW instead of other digital modes with this radio as well as my other radios to this point. They all need a computer and a sound card to get them to do digital modes (other than CW) and I normally don’t have a ton of time for all that setup and getting it going. CW is on the air really fast, like SSB. You can also see the silent fan mod I did a while back (there is a blog post showing what I did) and I really like this mod as it eliminated the fan noise entirely. I need to make a screen to protect the fan though, that is still a project to be done…

You have seen this view shown below in the past, but I included it today since I got the moon in the photo too… lol. I do like the system I have built for activating a park with a hamstick, it is really fast to deploy and when I do a rove, I simply coil up the counterpoise wires and lay them in the truck bed. pull off the radiator from the QD base and lay it in the bed of the truck too, unplug the coax and coil up the portion to get it inside the truck and I am off to the next park. The antenna mount can ride in the receiver hitch easily enough so it is not an issue. This sounds like a lot but it literally happens in two minutes tops and I am driving to the next park.

Another thing I did today was hook up the inline power meter. Now I don’t remember why it only shows 8.9 watts of output. I had the radio set to 15 watts forward power so I probably took the photo after I let off of the key as the amp hour meter doesn’t clear till you disconnect it from power. I don’t remember if I had it in tune mode or if I was simply sending dashes. But what I was looking for was the total amp hours of use, this tells me if my little 8A/h battery would hold up to a heavy activation. From this meter reading it will. Now remember, this is with the radio set to 15 watts too, so under a normal activation of 5 to 8 watts, this would last for many hours. Today I went for two hours and got 70 contacts in the log and only used 3.68A/h and that makes me much more confident in using the smaller battery for activations now. I had my concerns before but now I don’t. Another point here is that I normally try to add something else to the activation that has to do with information gathering so I also learn something that I didn’t know before, today it was the amp hour info.

So I get to the park and take my time and listen to the bands a few minutes once the rig is installed and decide to start on 40 meters as the noise level was really low today. I get on the air at 13:25 UTC (9:25 local time) and start calling CQ… It didn’t take long to secure the activation and I had not left 40 meters! I don’t get on the lower bands too often as I am not at the park at night when the bands are less noisy so I don’t get the hams in the closer states like Tennessee or Georgia, it was really nice to get some of those states in the log for a change. Hanging out on 15 and 17 meters nets much more distant stations so I have to remember to come back to 40 every once in a while…

I then move to 30 meters for a little while to see what I could do there and work several more people on 30 meters in about ten minutes of operating. 30 meters at this park is a crap shoot to be honest, some days it is quiet and some days it has this intermittent computer noise that just shuts the band down, today the noise was nowhere to be found to my delight!

Then…I…got…on…twenty…

First off, who doesn’t work Bill (K4NYM) if he is booming in to your station and for a Park to Park no less? So I hunted him before setting up on frequency. It took one try, he is an amazing operator and I aspire to operate as efficiently as him some day.

Things take off once I park on a frequency and start calling CQ. I promptly work a page and a half of calls then I get the one you see below. Not one to brush off anyone calling me, I take the time to have a nice QSO with him as he is working on getting on the air with CW and is having to do head copy only…I later learn… So I take the time to write down what he is sending so I can read it and respond when it is my turn. Turns out he is just now getting back active in CW after taking a long hiatus from it and also, he cant see, hence the head copy only. Talk about a person with conviction, he never gave up. I was so glad Justin called me and feel honored he felt confident in me enough to throw his call into the fray of POTA not knowing what would happen. That took guts.

Once we finished our QSO it was back to the POTA game in full swing. I struggled with one thing today more than anything else… stations zero beating me. It never fails, I get two or three stations that due to modern technology, will zero beat me perfectly. This in itself isn’t a problem and is really the most efficient QSO to have in CW, but what happens is that those two or three stations melt together into the one single tone and it is unintelligible. So If I don’t pull you out on the first try, move up or down 30 to 40 hertz, This will make you off frequency enough to sound different and you wont blend with the other stations and I will get you on the first try, this is an old contesting trick and by golly it works, I will have one station that stands out and is clearly definable and the rest is this one huge tone. I never really understood it till I was an activator trying to pull one call out of the mayhem, then I got it. Now when I hunt I leave my XIT or Transmit Incremental Tuning on and set 40 hz high just for this reason.

Once I hit 70 QSOs today I had been on the air for two straight hours so I went QRT and shut down the radio. It was a great activation and I really enjoyed working with a new (relatively speaking) ham on building his CW skills back up to what they were. So till next time get your radio out!!!

72

WK4DS - David

Counterpoise testing during a POTA Activation

Today involved some experimentation as well as a POTA activation. I tested some changes to the radials I use on my hamstick system out of curiosity and came away with some interesting results. Read on to see the AAR and the results of this test.

Today was supposed to be a quick little activation and then I was going to do a few other things, but plans are made to be changed from what I can tell as the bands were doing well for me and I stayed longer than I planned. But then the sun can bring that full circle as you will see below.

The operating position today shown above, was on top of the hill at the frisbee golf course and on the bed cover of the truck. Turns out that was somewhat of a bad idea. It just got hotter as the day progressed and the sun quickly came over the door I was using to shade me. This is what ultimately caused me to go QRT when I did as I was having a decent run on 20 meters at the time. It was just plain hot, with the sun seemingly cooking my right ear while I was working ops. I did enjoy working several ops today I have seen in my log before plus some that I have not. I even got a Canadian which is always nice.

This is probably the best image of my 40m hamstick and mount I have ever gotten. With the sun in the right spot, the whole antenna lit up well enough for the camera to get it. The setup is not actually mobile as it requires a counter poise to get it to work it’s best, but wow… it worked really well today, especially well today actually for some reason. I can hear surprisingly well on these tiny HF antennas too. I own three different brands of hamsticks (covering 40, 30, 20, 17 and 15) and can not tell a difference in any of them as far as how well they work. They all just work really well.

These two photos tell a story about what was happening at the location today on 30 meters. When people talk about having RF noise at a location, this is what it looks like on a radio that doesn’t have a waterfall display. The photo above is what the noise floor looked like when the RF noise was not present and the bottom image is what it looked like when it started up. It also was not constant, but appeared to by cyclic in nature as it would spool up and would just be some sort of hash for about 20 seconds and then it would just go away for about 30 seconds maybe longer. I would be able to work one contact and then it would come back and if the hunters were not transmitting with an S9 signal, I couldn’t hear them. This is really frustrating and is one of the reasons I don’t activate 30 meters more than I do. But so it life and how much fun would it be if we never had problems to solve? It would get pretty boring pretty fast… Even with this RF hash coming in and out, I was still able to get 9 calls in the log on 30 meters today so I count that as a win anyway.

The next thing I want to share about today has to do with the antenna system I was using. I have made tuned radials for all of my hamstick except the 15 meter unit (I have not deployed it yet, but soon I will.) I went to a lot of trouble to tune these radials too, with a ton of time at home working on this. Well, it turns out that I didn’t need to do that for the 30 meter hamstick at all. I deployed my nanoVNA today and did some measurements on the hamsticks to confirm nothing has changed with them and figured out something just out of curiosity. Seems that the radials for 40 & 20 meters work just fine on 30 meters too. This means one set of radials for all three of those hamsticks. Next outing I will take the 17 and 15 meter hamsticks and tune them up and see if the same radials will work on them too…fingers crossed. I am always looking for ways to simplify my station setup and the radials has been one of the slowest things to deploy of all the gear for POTA with the hamsticks. So if I can get it down to just the two radials and not having to remember the color codes for them and such I will count that as another win in my book.

The above photo shows that the antenna is fine on the 20 meter CW section, even though it is technically low on the best part of the chart, it is only 1.188:1 where I normally work on the 20 meter band. Well, knowing that, below is what it looks like on 30 meters with the 40/20 meter radials instead of the tuned radials I made up for just for the 30 meter band. Pretty crazy huh? Looks almost identical to the 20 meter chart and even almost matches the 20 meter SWR value. I was blown away by how good this turned out and to think I have never even tried it before today… Another thing I noticed about hamsticks in general is that they act like bandpass filters across the HF spectrum, I did open up the range on the nanoVNA and it does have other nulls IN THE VHF SPACE, but each hamstick has ONLY ONE spot they are resonant at in the 0 - 30mhz spectrum. No multiple harmonics like the EFHW, just one really deep SWR null is all you get. So plan accordingly, but to be honest, it works really well so I am not going to complain. I think this might actually work as a band pass filter but have not had the chance to test it yet. Maybe I will set this up at winter field day and see what it sounds like there. That should do it.

Here is the log from this activation and the signal reports look good for a mismatched antenna on the trailer hitch of my truck. I was using 15 watts though so that might have helped some. I have been sending with more power lately to just play with the Argonaut to see how hot the heat sink gets at various power levels and on CW it barely gets warm at all with 15 watts of RF so I am really happy with that. I am doing this test since i changes the fan a while back to reduce the fan noise as the factory fan is quite loud. I have a blog post showing what I did with this if you are interested in that.

All in all I learned something new and had a great activation at the same time. So till next time go get your radio out and make some contacts on it!

Testing a new antenna AND CW key during a POTA activation!

I decided to pack up the Argonaut 5 and go activate Cloudland Canyon today to get some much needed air time and wanted to try out my new POTA key that I picked up at the 2023 Hamfest in Huntsville a little while back (actually you will be reading this in the future as I picked up the key last weekend but so is the life of a blog post) So follow along and look at what I found out today while making a few contacts from K-2169.

I also decided to do some testing of the Reliance Antenna Bugout 40 EFHW I had bought from N3VAN who was making them and selling them on the QRZ forums. The antenna looks really good with lots of attention to detail in the construction. I have never used an antenna that doesn’t have radials or a formal counterpoise at all. This one uses the coax shield as the counterpoise so, in theory, you don’t need a counterpoise at all. (Come to find out, you can bend the rules of EFHW antennas if you do add a counterpoise) I strung it up in the air between two trees out near the bluff at the park. This may have doped my results, but I am doing a test anyway so why not, right? The far end is about 30’ in the air. The near end is about 12’ up to the transformer and I dropped a 15’ piece of coax down to the radio. Done. Well, so I thought at least.

The far end is way up in this bright green tree behind my hand in the back ground. I am pointing to the end of the wire location in the tree.

Once I got the antenna up in the trees, I wanted to see what the plot looked like on the nanoVNA so I plugged it all in and this is what I got. The antenna is technically slightly long and is a little below optimal frequency on this day and rigged like this. I am not going to trim it at this point as I want to see what it does in other kinds of conditions like the winter and maybe right after a rain when it is still wet or maybe where it is set up over night and is soaked with dew. Even though it was off frequency a little in the configuration I had it in, the SWR was well within safe limits for operating any transceiver. I didn’t have a 2:1 SWR at any point when I was testing a particular band and that if fine with me if I don’t have to carry a tuner with me. There was a side bonus to this setup too, for some reason with the whole antenna elevated like I had it, it was giving me a wide coverage (read that as a low q) in the bottom of the 10 meter band. So low in fact, that it was within usable range even on 12 meters without needing any sort of a tuner! That is 40,20,15,12 & 10 in one antenna with zero mods needed. That is winning in my book.

This was the plot without anything other than the 15’ coax going to the common mode choke.

Now get this, I added a radial to the system, but in an unusual location. I put it on the end of the coax on the connector next to the common mode choke right next to the radio and just stretched it out over the ground. This length of wire was 9.5’ in length and when I did this, the plot changed a lot. I lost the 12 meter dip but picked up a much broader area between 20 and 15 meters to the point that 17 meters was below 2:1 SWR at this point. This means that if I add this simple piece of wire I now have a “no tuner needed” antenna that covers 6 bands! Almost everything is usable…sans 30 meters, so I am really happy with this antenna. The next time I set it up will be to test it as a sloper like it would be used if it is a portable setup and I had only one tree to rig it to. Then we will plot it again and see what I come up with. I am curious to see if the frequency of the dips changes with the relation of the end of the antenna to the ground. I dont think it will but RF is a fickle girl…lol.

This plot is the aforementioned setup plus a 9.5’ length of wire tied to the coax connecter at the common mode choke.

This much wire is all that I needed to gain access to 17 meters without having to carry an antenna tuner with me, this is very liberating to be honest. Just adding a small radial to the system makes this super easy to use. The Reliance Antennas 40m Bugout EFHW comes with a winder to store in on as well as a carabiner clip to connect the far end to the cord. The transformer end has an eye bolt that works well for a hoist point to raise the other end of the antenna.

I next setup the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio on the table and connected all the stuff to make it work. Once it was powered up and ready, I plugged in the star of the show, my new N3ZN CW Key. He builds some really nice keys and I have walked by his table at several hamfests recently and today I decided that it was time to give one a whirl as they say. So I chose the smallest one he had at the show since I wanted it for POTA activations. The plan is to keep it in the Argonaut “GO BOX” that I built last year. It took me two trips to the field to learn to use it properly too. Since it is so small, if you have a heavy hand when you send it will move around a lot on you. The trick is to set the action light enough that you just have to touch the paddles to send the code, this way it is a light operation and the key stays put on the table like it should. These keys come with the cord hardwired to them so you cant buy a simple aux cable and plug it into the key, but it didn’t cause me any trouble so I don’t mind it. The installed cable is high quality and I have no doubt that it will last a very long time.

Once the antenna was squared away and I had my 17m “element” nearby, I was ready to crank up the radio. The new key plugged into the keyer I recently acquired from eBay and we are off to the races! Or so I thought as it turned out that KJ4BAD happened to be walking by and stopped in to see if I was doing POTA and we had a great chat for about 10 minutes or so about all things radio. I always enjoy running into other hams while out at a park.

I really like the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio, it has almost all of the CW functions that I use are on the surface. There is a could of things that you hit a button and then make the adjustments and you are good to go. The other thing that is great about this radio is that it has 20 watts of transmitter power. This is awesome when the bands are not as good as they were back in the winter. Also the DSP filtering works surprisingly well. It is also really good with other modes, but I just use it for CW… I might make a cable at some point to put the key into the front socket instead so it is simpler to connect the key. You see the mic key will key the radio so that means my little memory keyer will work in that socket. Who knows when I will do that though…

After we finished chatting I settled in for some POTA therapy and dialed around a little to find 15 was open with a bunch of stations on the air. I setup and start calling and you can see in the log that I only made two contacts before giving up and moving to 17 meters where I usually make several contacts but today I only netted one. Things were looking pretty dismal till I went to 20 meters. Once on 20 things turned around for me. I fairly quickly got the activation and proved out all the gear I had brought that day.

This photo shows where I would place the extra radial on the Coax connector. The coupling between the common mode choke and the feedline made for an easy spot to add it. I simply stripped the wire back a little and twisted the wire over this point. Simple as that. The easiest mod I have ever done to tune my antenna to another band in the history of ever.

This was the view I had today while operating, this is why I like POTA over other activities. The view is epic. So there you have it. My POTA “test and tune” trip in a simple blog post. Until next time, 72.

de WK4DS

A couple of quick activations testing the antennas

The past couple of days have been busy and there was still time for a couple of quick activations along the way.

First stop is the Estelle Trailhead on Crockford Pigeon Mtn WMA (K-3742) over in LaFayette GA while coming home from visiting with my mom. This is actually a new park for me even though it is only 15 miles from home by road… I dont know why, but I have never activated it for some reason. The Estelle parking area is fully within the WMA boundary so it was a simple matter to pull in, get parked out of the road and setup a radio in the shade for a little while. Today saw the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 again as this radio was the one in the truck at the time. It is also one of my favorite HF radios at this point. It only lacks two things to be the perfect radio, an SWR meter and an internal antenna tuner…but I digress.

I said that I setup in the shade, but there really wasn’t much to start with…lol. I did get lucky and a nice cloud moved in after a few minutes and helped keep things cool. I don’t like to let my radios just sit and cook in the sun if I can help it and will go to fairly great lengths to prevent them from getting hot. This is what you see here. The shade was just wide enough to protect most of the radio from direct sun so it didn’t get very hot before the clouds moved in. On top of that the tool bag is shading my battery in this photo too, I didn’t want it to get too hot either…haha.

I started on 15 meters today as I finally have a 15 meter capable radio and antenna too! Well the RBN showed 29dB for me! That is crazy good for someone with 15 watts under their belt into “7” land. But try as I may, there just wasnt that many hunters on 15 meters for some reason. I did get 3 QSOs in the log while on 15 meters so all was not lost. Then I moved down to 17 meters and did quite well there, picking up several more contacts. Then I finished out the activation on 20 meters which is my backup if I need to get my 10 for the activation. 20 never seems to let me down either as I can almost garuntee at least a few contacts there.

So after getting the activation, I wanted to experiment with the antenna system and see how it would work on the drive home. Turns out the 20 meter hamstick without radials has worse SWR than with them, going from 1.15:1 up to 1.7:1. Who would have guessed? LOL. This is not a real problem though as this is still well below what I consider useable SWR. As long as I can stay below 2.5:1 I will operate. That is the upper limit though and I will work on the antenna a good bit to get it down but if nothing helps and I have 2.5:1 SWR, I will try it. The radios can handle anything below 3:1 so I set my personal threshold below that… I know some people wont use their gear if isn’t almost perfectly 1:1, but I have come to realize that it isn’t so important and the signal reports speak for themselves.

On the drive home, I start hearing this REALLY strong signal booming in to the Argonaut 5. The above photo shows what the signal level coming into the radio was 20 over S9, and remember that the Argonaut 5 has a S meter that doesn’t like to give out good signal reports. So I start working on head copy on the drive and finally get that it is W1AW/0 in Colorado and he (or she) is working as a POTA park! So I do what any sane POTA hunter would do, I pull over at the New Salem Firehall and work them mobile! WK4DS/M got into their log!!! WooHoo!!! So at the bottom of the logbook page you will see where I logged the hunter contacts on this trip since I was not at a park when I made these contacts.

New Salem Firehall parking lot was empty and worked great for getting my hunter contact on the drive home.

As a side note, I finally made the hitch pin (shown below) for my antenna mount so I can use it for the rover program without having to pull it off the truck and stow it between parks. I am working on reducing the setup and breakdown time at each park as I am going to attempt a 10 park rove and this will take planning to make it happen. Things like this can add up on the rove to make it take too long since the drive time from one park to the next will be the biggest time eater of the day. So if I can find simple little things that I can do on each stop to save time, I can make the most of the activation.

I made the main pin that holds the mount, but I simply bought the little pin to lock it in place. Sometimes it is smarter to buy a part rather than spend the time to make it. The main pin was easy enough to make from scrap shafting material. but to make the keeper pin would have taken more than the 3$ it cost in time so I opted to simply buy it instead. To be honest, it would have probably been smarter to buy the main pin too, but I had a scrap piece of round and time available on the lathe so I just carved one out right quick rather than drive to the store to buy one. Another plus is that I could make it like I wanted which included adding the handle to the main side so it is easier to pull when breaking down the system. On top of the pin making, I also opted to add an extra set of holes to the antenna mount so that the pin can be left in for simple POTA activation days where I dont have to pull the pin to simply setup for a single park. This allows me to just stick the mount in the hitch and use it like I have been and take it down when done so I can stow it inside the truck bed when not in use.

The next park I went to a couple of days later is the Chickamauga National Military Park. K-0716. This park lies in two states, so today I opted to activate the Tennessee side of the park. This location is easy to access as it is literally on the side of the road. This is why I like this location and hate it at the same time. The location is called Eagles Nest and is part of the military park completely within the park boundary.

K-0716 presents me with a quandary. This “shack” position makes for a comfortable operating position but the road noise is really bad due to the proximity to the road… I have used headphones here before and that seems like the correct thing to do if I operate here much more. I am going to go ahead and get my repeat offender for activating this park. I am already half way to this award anyway so why not? Ha Ha… Another thing that surprises me is that there are some fairly large trucks to travel up this narrow and winding road to the top of the mountain. Like large d4livery trucks kind of large, I guess it is normal, but it just kind of caught me off guard to see such large trucks going by while I was there.

The radial situation is unique here too, since it is on the shoulder of the road, I have to put both radials on the same side of the truck. Whenever I do this, I always get out the nanoVNA to see what this has done to the SWR plot. As usual, it did affect it but not by much. I was surprised to see that on 15 meters it needed both radials to get a decent SWR before I was happy. So I get it setup, spot myself, start a log in HAMRS and start calling CQ. I finally net a couple of contacts on 15 meters, but there are not many hunters even though the band was open. It did have some fading, but it was fairly strong anyway and could easily support use, but people were not there. So I moved down to 17 meters. Once on 17 meters the RBN (Reverse Beacon Network) picked me up and showed the strongest signal report I have ever seen for one of my activations. 42dB is insane! I have never seen that and this was with 15 watts no less. So people MUST be on this band, right? Well no, it seems that all the people on HF were down on 20 meters having a grand old time without the few of us up on 17 meters. I added 4 more QSOs to the log with one being KJ7DT who followed me down the bands working me on all three on this day. To me this is awesome as it shows the propagation for all three bands was really good as he is in Idaho which is almost 1800 miles from me.

So I finally decide to join in on the fun on 20 meters and QSY down with what seemed like the rest of planet earth and secured the activation in short order. Getting Paul - KJ7DT a third time on this day and Keith WI0S twice! Both of these calls have appeared in my log on numerous occasions. These are some very prolific hunters and I just want to thank them for being there to hunt like they do. They are what make activating parks fun. With 13 calls in the log I officially had the activation so I packed up as it was getting close to lunch and the road noise made it very hard to hear as well and headed into Chattanooga to go have lunch with the girls.

The clip board has made a huge difference in operating ease for me. I can now not worry about the wind turning the pages and it gives me a hard surface to work from no matter where I am. This alone helps a ton. As seen here, I am able to lay the keyer and the key on it as well as log. If you still paper log this is a very handy addition to the POTA kit in my book. Yes, I still paper log. I have had too many computers where they crash unexpectant and you have to reboot the machine and wait for it to get back up and running to trust it with my only log of an activation. The paper notebook gives me a durable backup to my phone logbook that I run at the same time.

Side note about how I log… I will run HAMRS in parallel to my paper logs and if the activation is going kinda slow, I can log both at once and keep the electronic log caught up in real time. This is a recent thing brought on by me wanting to not have to set aside time at home just to transcribe the log so I can submit it online. I found that a lot of my activations are slow enough to permit time to log the QSOs while I work the activation and not have to do it at home. So if things speed up and I cant log both the paper and electronic, then I always default to paper and the battery never goes dead in paper logs nor does the app crash… Then when things slow down, I will let the keyer send CQs and I will catch up the electronic log while I am calling so I don’t waste that time just sitting there waiting on an answer. This works really well and I can normally email the log from the park before I leave so when I get home I can simply upload them to the POTA site since it wont let me upload from my phone yet…

Here is something else that a lot of people that don’t do field ops have no idea about. A carrier with a bunch of backup equipment is a must. Everything in this bag has been used on an activation in the last few months in one way or the other. Notice there is power cords and spare coax and three pens are visible on the side, this is something that you quickly learn, things break, pens dry out, you run out of paper, all of this is things you have to prepare for before going to the park and the only way you learn this is from doing it. I can preach to the ends of time but until you have to end your activation because your coax connector came off or the center conductor broke on the coax or your antenna mount breaks, you wont prepare for it as a contingency. That is just how it is…Another really handy tool to have is a Leatherman multitool of some kind, brand isn’t important, what matters is that you have one, I don’t know how many times I have used mine to save the activation some how. Totally worth the price of admission in my book.

QSO maps are awesome, I have KJ7DT in the log on all three bands today so his one pin is actually three. Just like I have WI0S in the log twice so his pin represents two contacts. This is neat to see though as you get a visual idea of what the bands were like on this day. If I studied space weather more then I would be able to corelate the data so that it would be more meaningful, but like this it really doesn’t tell much other than skip distance for the bands I used. That is about it but it is still fun to look at them nonetheless.

So this is what it looks like to activate two parks on two different days and how the setups vary for each one based on the conditions for each location. Next time I will carry headphones for the one by the road so I can hear better. Till then, get your radio out and make some contacts with it!!!!

The weather can be fickle…

We went to my local park (K-2169) to do a little POTA and to enjoy the nice weather there.

I setup at the canyon rim today in the shade and got my rig setup in my usual tree and everything. I look on the web and the MUF showed that 17 meters was open and I dialed around and did hear stations so that was promising. I tuned up the antenna on an open frequency and started calling CQ…and called and called …and called. No one answered my calls for something like 10 straight minutes. I even had someone respot me once but never heard anyone on the air

I even took a few minutes to confirm that the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and the Ten Tec 277 Antenna tuner were set correctly with my nanoVNA. They were in fact set correctly…so I just wasn’t being heard on 17 meters. Probably because I am only using 15 watts from the Argonaut. Maybe because the band sucked like a Hoover vacuum cleaner that day, who knows…

This antenna tuner is the Ten Tec 277. It has options to connect a COAX to an antenna, a balanced line to the antenna and even a random wire input (which is what I was using on this day) The variety of connections is what led me to acquire it in the first place, I like the ability to use it with any antenna I have and it works quite well in that role. It is easy to tune and the SWR meter works well too. I don’t use it as a traditional SWR meter though, I use it to watch for changes in the antenna system. If the SWR starts to climb then I know something is changing and I need to look into it, I have had things like the counterpoise wire break in the crimp lug before and not realize it due to it being inside the heat shrink tubing and this meter showed it to me. It also works for tuning purposes if I forget my nanoVNA as well.

My nanoVNA kit is almost entirely adapters and the tiny little VNA over to the side. I love this device and wonder how I got along without one before.

Anyway, back to that activation on that day. Since17 meters was apparently turned off by this point, it was with a heavy heart that I QSY-ed to 40 meters. I tuned up and started calling on this band and it didn’t take long to get someone in the log. After getting quite a few “locals” on 40 meters, I shifted my focus up to 20 meters. For me with my low antennas in park activations I will normally get closer states on 40 meters and more distant stations on 20 meters and higher. That is one of the reasons I like 17 and 15 so much. When they are open I have had great performance with DX stations. If you look at the map below, the close in contacts are all the 40 meter contacts and some of the closer ones are 20 meters.

I just love maps like this one where there is this one lone QSO way off.

It was about this time that the storm clouds really started to look ominous on the western horizon. But they didn’t really seem to be moving closer so I kept going. Well, 20 meters was open is all I can say. My very first QSO on 20 meters was with G3WPF in the UK! I actually thought he was an American station and I was missing the first letter so I had him repeat it a couple of times…lol. I am glad he didnt give up as I figured it out finally and got him in the log. What an awesome way to hop on 20 meters with! DX right out of the chute!!!

As can be seen from the logbook, I had a decent run on 20 meters before two things happened at basically the same time. The storm started to move into the area, and another ham tuned up on top of me and I couldn’t hear stations anymore. I chalk it up to them not being able to hear me as I was only 15 watts into a random wire pretty low to the ground. Anyway, that was enough to get me to call QRT and pack it all up before it got wet.

Until next time I hope to hear you on the air!

de WK4DS 72

Overcast POTA activation strikes gold!

So today was a good day for POTA. I did some small work related items, grabbed the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and headed to Cloudland to get an activation in before lunch. Before I even setup on frequency I was dial-ing around on 17 meters to check the band and found G3VBS calling CQ with no takers! So I figure, why not see if he can hear me… turns out 20 watts was plenty to make a contact with England and we had a great chat for quite a few minutes with only a little QSB.

Today I setup at the frisbee golf course parking area as it is the highest part of the park as well as the quietest RF wise. The lower lot has a nicer view but with the proximity to the campground and so many more people in general, it tends to be noisy comparatively.

Something else I like about the upper lot is I can either deploy the setup in the photo above or I can string a wire in a tree as well. Rigging the hamsticks in the lower lot is more difficult to say the least. So I was a little worried about the impending rain that was on the radar, I normally use the setup you see as I can sit in the truck and operate even in the rain. This is really nice as even inclement weather cant stop my POTA activations! Haha.

Well sure enough when I got home, it started raining so I made a good call here.

I did setup on the bed cover though, which is a little exposed but I figured I could move it into the truck pretty fast should it start to rain.

Today’s radio is the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 which is a wonderful little portable HF transceiver. It is larger than the TR-35 but it also has multiple modes and has every HF band available as well. Today I started on 17 meters because… why not? And that is where I heard G3VBS. I figured I would secure the activation with ease after having a great QSO with the UK. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. I only made one more contact on 17 before giving up and moving to 20 meters. Once on 20 meters things started to pick up for me.

There were a couple of pretty strong pile ups at times and it was fairly difficult to dig out a sinlge call. Mainly because most of the stations were zero beat with me. This makes all the signals turn into one large tone and I get garbled info. Luckily, I have learned a couple of tricks around this and can work with most people now. I will simple call W? Or if I get part of a Canadian call, VE? You get the point. This is a tried and true trick of pile up runners (did I just make up a new term? LOL) around the world. When you cant make out anything, just ask for the most common prefix you know and someone will reply. It worked well for me today as I was able to break apart the pile up and get every one into the log that I could hear. I even worked 4 or 5 stations after calling QRT as they were asking and I had time. I ended up with 36 QSOs toward my day as I had one dupe so it was a great day for POTA. If you want to know more about POTA just give it a google search and head over to their website. Until later, 73 de WK4DS

Component failure sucks…

When things dont go right it can be frustrating but when things are like my activation recently they are downright demoralizing…

So I had an evening free and wanted to do some POTA so I decide to setup in the truck with my hamsticks … since it is faster… you know since everything is ready to go. Little did I know what I was about to get into.

So I goto the frisbee golf parking area and get everything out to do an in-truck activation. This is how I operate if it is raining and has worked well for me in the past. I just tape a “rain shield” to the coax connector made from a peanut package with both ends cut out. Haha, reuse at its finest. But today, I didnt need it since it was not raining.

Next I break out the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and my N3ZN cw key and connect it with my HamGadgets PicoKeyer and I am all set. Another thing with today is I planned to activate with my 8Ah LiFePO4 battery to see if it can handle an activation with the Argonaut 5. I have my inline power meter this time so I can monitor the voltage too. I also can monitor Amp/hour usage but completely forgot to do this since I got wrapped up in other things. I setup this kit in the cab of the truck as you see so that I could sit comfortably while being in the truck. This works really well when I am solo, but gets tougher if I bring someone with me. As you can see below it was up to almost 3 Ah by the time I took this photo. I wished I had thought to get a photo of it at the end to have that data. I guess I will have to do it again… lol.

But before all this got started I connected my antenna and wanted to check the SWR before starting as I have been experimenting with the radials some here lately and have learned some interesting things about them. I get out my nanoVNA and connect it to the antenna and it shows like it isn’t there…at all. I mess with the VNA a while and try to see if it might have a loose adapter on the VNA or if the calibration might have been done wrong, which I found not to be the case after calibrating it again… Nothing in the VNA was wrong, so I get out of the truck and inspect the antenna and it looks right, nothing is out of the ordinary. I go back and get my trusty little multimeter and decide to ohm the center pin of the coax to the shield to see what it measures, it should be open to the meter…it isn’t, quite the opposite actually, it is shorted. So I immediately go to the antenna and disconnect my brand new, reputable brand coax and check it with it removed from the antenna, it measures good now. Whew! That was close! I didn’t want my new coax to be bad right out of the chute.

So now that I am pretty sure it isn’t the coax, I turn my attention to the antenna. I remove the radiator and test the base to center pin and it reads shorted!! What in the world is going on here!?!? I look closely at the mount, which at this point has the BNC to PL259 adapter on it and nothing else and so I remove the top portion of the antenna mount to make sure water has not entered the plate where it passed through and has created a path with corrosion to the mount. Nope, not there, it looks perfect.

So I remove the adapter and the short goes away immediately. I reinstall it and it returns. I remove the adapter and check it and it measures fine and so does the antenna mount now. What gives? Well, I had a new adapter I picked up at the hamfest from the Wireman and I just installed it to see what would happen. The problem vanished. I tried wiggling the antenna and the coax and pushed and pulled on the adapter and the meter didn’t change a bit, all I can figure is that something in the other adapter is shorting when the adapter bottoms out on the antenna mount at the point where it gets tight.

This is what went bad. On the surface from every angle it looks perfect, but when tightened in place it produces a dead short across the antenna to ground. Don’t blindly think that simple things like this can’t fail. Obviously they can. I will be more diligent in checking my system routinely too. The Argonaut 5 has no SWR meter on it, which is pretty much the only thing about it I don’t like, so I have to use other means of monitoring the SWR. The VNA was that tool today.

Once that was sorted out, I was able to get on the air and make some contacts. Since I was dancing with the end of the UTC day, I figured I would start on 20 meters to improve my odds of getting an activation before the day flips over. The hunters came in clutch and I EASILY made the activation. Once I cleared all the calling stations, I QSYed to 17 meters to see what I could do there as the band was open earlier…before I found the bad antenna adapter…

Turns out 17 meters right during grey line to the west coast will net some cool contacts. All but one are from the west coast and that is always fun as I rarely get to work California due to noise on the bands. All in all, I netted 41 contacts in the log all before the UTC day ended. So it all worked out anyway. Moral to the story is two fold. The first one is to take extra parts for your system and two is don’t assume anything… this adapter looked perfect visually but did not work when installed. Have fun y’all and I hope to hear you on the air soon.

PS: Another perk to working POTA is things like these photos I grabbed of the clouds. You normally don’t see these at home in the house. If I had stayed home or threw in the towel on the antenna (which I almost did) I would not have seen these beautiful sunset clouds.

73 de WK4DS

15 meter POTA activation with DX!

Today I went to K-2169 (Cloudland Canyon State Park) and setup my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and proceeded to work 15 meters with the intent to not get on 20 meters at all. (I did wander down to 17 meters but not till I had secured the activation on 15 meters first.) I just enjoy the pursuit of the higher bands for some reason. I really like to work 15 meters in particular and I have no good reason why either… I pulled the wire up into a tree in an almost vertical orientation but it could still be called a sloper if you held you head right. Probably a 60 degree angle sloper, but it was up in the tree and the 13’ counter poise was 90 degrees to it.

The view from my operating position never gets old. I love activating this park with the view and the tree canopy giving almost perpetual shade it makes for a wonderful location almost all year round.

This is the view directly behind me. There was a fairly lively family reunion or some such happening in this shelter. I had to turn up the volume a couple of times to be able to hear over them. LOL. This is also one of the reasons I like the location I am at, should it start to rain, I can just unhook the antenna wire and battery and basically carry the radio and tuner to the shelter in just seconds.

Once again, the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 was front and center. I have really grow to love this little radio. I can see why they have such a cult following, the receiver is great, the filters are simple to use and effective, the radio has minimal menu options that mainly follow the “set n forget” ideology, What’s not to love for a CW op? I think going forward this will be my main POTA radio for ops where I am near the truck and I will use the Penntek TR-35 for backpack ops due to its small size.

Another thing I did today was bring one of my large keys, this one has been out of the house several times already so it is no stranger to a picnic table. It is my prototype CW key I made many years ago, it works wonderfully too. I actually use it more than the newer model I made later that is still on the bench connected to the Omni 6+…

I am also using the HamGadgets keyer I picked up off of eBay a while back. This little keyer is the reason I now like using the Argonaut 5 on activations. The Argonaut doesn’t have memories in the keyer, so you have to pound out every bit of the code you send with it. This allows me to record some messages like my CQ and such so I can just hit a button and send the whole call for POTA.

Here we have something that a lot of people gloss over. Fuses. Also note that I have the battery connected to the input fuse and I deliberately chose the 10 amp fuse for the Argonaut since it is only 20 watts out. I need to take my inline meter and see what the draw is on dead key and adjust accordingly but for now I know the battery and radio are fuse protected like this. Don’t neglect to add fuses to your portable system, it still matters as much as at home. This is not a name brand fuse bank either which means I wont load it as heavy as they advertise, we all know these are built to the edge of spec anyway.

I wanted to show the case I transport the radio in. This is some sort of surplus military case that we picked up as Huntsville Hamfest last year for really reasonable money. A little cutting here and there and some new closed cell foam and contact adhesive and we have a case to carry the Argonaut 5 and a MFJ antenna tuner with a wire antenna connection input on it as well. You can see the tuner still in the case as I was using my Ten Tec tuner today since it was in the box with the antenna.

Well, I got on the air today on 15 meters and heard a good bit of band activity and so I figured I would check the POTA spots to see who all was on 15…turns out I was the only one on 15 meters on the spot page. I didn’t check it after that for a while but when I did there still wasn’t anyone other than me that was there. I don’t know why other than the QSB (fading) that was happening. You can see the timestamps in my log where I would go 3 or 4 four minutes without so much as a call and then I would get several in a row. You can also see from the signal reports that when they did come in, they came in strong! As I was working through a tiny pile up with NK8O and VE3CT I could hear a weak station near the noise. Once I cleared the other two stations I could hear YS1MS coming out a little louder now! I was stoked to get central America in the log today! Yeah, I know the Oregon call was probably further away, but I got a DX call in the log from El Salvador today!!! WooHoo! When 15 is open is goes WAY out there! KJ7DT came booming in to me right off the bat. Man I love this hobby!

So it seemed that 15 meters started to close or something as I went several minutes without a call so I decided to tune up on 17 meters and see what I could scratch up. Well, 17 did not disappoint. I worked several stations fairly quickly and I could tell that I was on a lower band than before as the station that was coming in loud on 15 that was kind of near me (N2DI) was weaker on 17 meters. I actually worked several hams on both bands today, which is always awesome. But I did notice several hams from out west were on 17 but not 15 meters. You will notice two Idaho stations, two Utah stations and a Arizona station. It was almost like the signal on 15 hopped right over these guys or they don’t have a 15 meter antenna…who knows to be honest. Anyway at about 21:43 UTC I hit a little pileup of 3 or 4 stations and once again started pulling the callsigns out one at a time. I kept hearing this station down near the noise, but it was solid, just the other stations were a lot louder and I could copy them easier so I went ahead and worked them out. Then I started pulling out the call. I got the number right away, it was a 1 and I knew I had heard the CC at the end…what was that first letter again? W? No, that isn’t right. “UR CALL?” J… It was a J callsign!!! I have never worked a Japan call before, I have never honestly heard a Japan ham loud enough to be able to make a QSO with them, I have heard them before but they were down in the noise. This one was weak, but clearly I could hear the call. J…H…1…O…C…C… YES, it was Japan!!! I couldn’t believe it when he gave me a 539 with my compromise antenna and 20 watts of power! I was on cloud nine for a few minutes after this. I even bragged to my buddies about it. It was a great day today. I had hoped to work a few J calls while I was in Hawaii, but never heard one while I was there. That is just how it goes…lol.

I ended up with 29 QSOs in the log today which is a great day as it means I secured the activation as I worked several DX stations to boot. What is your favorite DX station you have worked while operation portable or picnic table mobile or some such?

73 WK4DS

Ten Tec Argonaut 5 goes to the park and then gets a new fan!

I love this radio, it works so well and is really easy to use with minimal menu settings. Then again I love all TenTec radios and have an unhealthy addiction to the brand…lol. Is it really that bad of a problem? I bought this one “for field use”, you know… like Field Day in June or POTA, but I have found things about it that keep me reaching for other radios most of the time. Let’s take a look at some of these short comings for a field radio that I like to use while doing an activation.

So I get this radio out much less for a couple of reasons… The main one is that it doesn’t have a CW keyer memories built in like the ICOM IC-705 and the Penntek TR-35 have in them. This is a big deal if you plan to activate for more than an hour or so as calling cq over and over manually can be strenuous to say the least with time. You see the keyer does something for me other than relieve me from having to pound out the CQ all the time, it BUYS me time. I am able to make log notes and fill in missing parts of the log while it is happily sending the CQ for me. This is a huge help after a quick string of QSOs and I am getting the times written down along with my usual log notes I like to make.

Quick rabbit to chase here… There is a few notable call signs for me on this page. K9IS is my first Hunter to get to 50 QSOs with me and KJ7DT has been showing up in my log more frequently lately too. The other call is the Canadian, just because he is DX…lol. Always cool to have those DX callsigns in the logbook. Now back to your regularly scheduled chat about the radio.

The next reason I don’t normally grab this radio is that it is fairly large compared to the other radios too. When I am operating in the truck, space is a valuable commodity and I am not able to spread all the gear around easily, if you will notice in the above photo I actually have the Argonaut balanced on my camera bag so it wont be in the way of logging… This actually worked out pretty well though and I think I will come up with something for the other radios to sit in the same area in the future, it was really convenient having the whole surface for my book and key.

The next reason is that the fan is crazy loud and runs non-stop even when I have it turned down to 5 watts for my QRP ops.

A little about the activation today is also in order. I went to K-2169 (my local park) and went to my quiet place at the top of the hill. As you can see, I had the place to myself as usual.

So I get parked, then start assembling the antenna and getting the coax into the cab of the truck when I notice that the cable adapter I have on the base of the antenna is loose, I am not sure how long it has been loose, but it was pretty loose today, to the point the BNC connector spun when I went to install it. This is how I found it was loose. Point here is check those screw together connections from time to time. They work loose too. The one on the back of the radio was loose too… which I thought was odd since I have only used it a couple of times so far.

Although today I didn’t need them, the BNC converter is a nice adapter to have in your kit. I could have used regular PL=259 connectors today, but I had forgot that the antenna and the radio both use them so I just used the same cable I use for the other radios and it worked great.

Another thing I have done is converted the power cable to use power-poles so I can plug it into any power source I use, which now also includes the power port in the truck too. I feel this is a worthwhile thing to do if you plan to work field ops a lot, standardization of the power connectors just makes sense.

I bought this case at the Huntsville Hamefest from Gigaparts and it is for some sort of military radio, but with a little cutting here and there and a little foam here and there it now houses the Argonaut 5 and a MFJ manual tuner as well as a wire antenna and some other miscellaneous items

Me and Roger (KG4WBI) have this obsession of printing out and binding all the owners manuals for all our radios. So I keep this one in the case with the radio and it was needed on this outing to see how to set a couple of menu items I had forgotten about.

Now for the Argonaut 5 Radio Fan…

The fan on this radio is just plain loud, that is the only way you can say it. It is also wired to run non-stop for some reason. This is also a pretty large current drain for no real reason at all other than to make absolutely certain the finals don’t get too hot… At some later point, I plan to make a small thermal sensing circuit that will fire a relay to cycle the fan instead of it just running all the time. but first things first, I am changing the fan itself with one of the low noise fans that another op from a TenTec group shared and it worked really well for them. I downloaded a sound meter app for my phone to see if it was measurable and have the two meter readings to see for myself. Ignore the AVG and MAX values, I watched the meter for a few minutes and did a screen capture of what was really going on to get a more representative number. 65 seems pretty low, but when you are listening for signals near the noise floor, every dB matters so the new fan comes in at 45(44.9 is what I captured in the screenshot and this was a pretty good average from what I watched on the meter.) Now also remember this is an iPhone app and not a legit sound meter, but it does give us something to look at for reference. If it is right, which is possible, then this is a 20dB difference. This is huge as decibels are logarithmic in nature and not linear, this is equal to 100 times quieter! That is awesome and totally worth the effort! To the ear, this new fan is dead silent, I didn’t think it was even running when I turned the radio on actually. So I am really pleased with how this mod turned out, the radio has one less detriment to keep me from using it at parks!

Old fan measured right at the back of the radio.

New fan measured in the same place as the old fan, that is a 20dB change!!!!

This was the ham shack with the Argonaut turned off for reference.

Orderd this little guy from amazon and had it in a couple of days.

This fan is literally a plug-n-play replacement for the factory fan in the radio. I literally removed the case screws, the fan screws, one wire tie on the wiring harness and unplugged the fan. It was the easiest mod I have ever done to a radio…ever.

Something of note, this new fan is thicker and the old screws would not work in my application, but I had a couple of screws in the junk drawer that were about 1/4” longer that worked great so I am back in the game!

The fan connector is a standard computer fan plug so it doesn’t need anything special at all. This is refreshing as it seems everybody wants to use proprietary connectors these days for some reason.

All in all, this has turned out to be a great little excursion in more than one way. I got the Argonaut on the air and I also got the fan upgraded afterwards too. I really like the ergonomics of the little machine so I will see how I can fit it into my regular activations and use it more now. Do you have a radio that you love, but just dont use because of some little issue? Let’s hear what it is and see if I am the only guy that does this.

72

David

WK4DS