Today I went for a morning POTA activation at US-2169 and on my way over to the park, I gave KG4WBI (Roger) a call and invited him to join me. He agreed and after a little while of my working some CW on 15 meters, he arrived with a thermos of coffee and an eagerness to make some contacts!
Since I was ahead of him, I went ahead and setup the station complete with a full compliment of radials so I could use any band I wanted (of the 5 I have hamsticks for at this time...) and got it tuned up on 15 meters by making a slight adjustment to one of the radials. As you can see, I chose the usual spot for today’s activation. This was on purpose as I knew the lower area (which is actually where I kind of wanted to go, to be honest) was really busy with holiday traffic. This also meant that there would be more RF noise down there from inverters in the campground and such too.
This upper parking lot doesn’t see near as much traffic so I knew that it would be a much quieter RF environment. Sometimes you just have to choose between comfort (the lower area is in the shade under a bunch of old growth trees) and a quieter location so I could hear better. I chose to hear better since I knew Roger was coming. It wasn’t too bad, but it did get fairly hot towards the end of the activation to be honest about it.
With the antenna strung up and adjusted, I need to choose a radio. The radio turned out to be the Ten Tec Scout 555 because of the power output on SSB(50 watts). I knew we would be using SSB today and wanted to be able to make a bunch of contacts with it since Roger was going to be there as I am secretly addicting him to POTA a little at a time…hehehe. It worked as we operated together while he was there and I made sure he got enough contacts to get his first activation from US-2169. Now to get him an account and to upload his first log so all the hunters will get credit for his contacts too.
The Scout is a really great POTA rig as it has minimal controls on the front to the point that it has what you need and nothing else to be honest about it. It needs a couple more in my opinion and I may just get another one to build into something fun with some more front panel controls on it. But for now, this one works perfectly and I don’t want to risk killing it as I use it as my SSB POTA machine now. Before this one I had only made a handful of SSB contacts at parks and now I have dozens in the time since purchasing this radio. I really love the compact nature of the radio to be honest, I compare it to my Argonaut 5 in usability with more RF output…
Here is another insider tip…You can connect the CW key and the microphone at the same time, this doesn’t seem unusual till you find out there is no mode switch to go between these two modes. You simply start keying CW on the key and it will transmit CW, and then you can key the microphone and transmit SSB in the next moment with no other interaction with the radio other than picking up the microphone. This is really awesome, but it comes with a caveat. The radio is transmitting CW on the SSB mode. This means that you have to adjust the frequency off from the desired frequency by the amount of the side tone, which is about 700 hertz. On top of that, you also have to shift the radio opposite of the sideband direction you are using. So if your on 40 meters, then you have to be 700hz above the desired frequency and if your on 15 meters, then you have to be 700hz below the frequency. This took me a little bit to figure out too as I am used to being able to simply dial the frequency and call it good. So in the photo below, I am actually on 21.042mhz… As the radio warmed up, it shifted in frequency a little. This is why it is important to do two things, let the radio warm up before getting on the air and look at the display from time to time to confirm things have not changed.
What is nice about taking a pile of pelican style cases (none of them are actually pelican cases) is that you can have a ton of extra gear with you so if something goes awry, you have spares. Another thing that happens is you will have access to your favorite hardware like my N3ZN cw key! So I get it out of the case for the Argonaut 5, which is where I store it normally and use it for this activation. The Scout has two key inputs on the back, one if for a straight key and the other is for a paddle. Well, if I use my Picokeyer, then it goes into the straight key input. The paddle input is fed to a Curtis keyer chip and that is built into the radio. The only downside to this keyer, which works beautifully BTW, is that it does’t have memories. I like having memories for POTA as you end up sending some information A LOT and it takes some of the sending burden off of me so I can log and check the radio and such. Turning the page on the log book seems to be a good reason to use memories on the keyer too… lol. If you have the need for a dead simple CW memory keyer, I can recommend the Hamgadgets Picokeyer VERY HIGHLY, it works flawlessly and runs what seems like forever on a single coin cell battery. I am closing in on a year for this one and it is showing no signs of needing a battery yet…
No matter how many radios you take though, if you forget your log book, you will end up logging in your journal…like I did today. I luckily took my journal with me as I like to make notes about all sorts of stuff while I am out and this is another good reason to have it. This is not the first time I have defaulted to this notebook either, it has bailed me out more than once…lol. I did have plenty of pens though so that wasn’t a problem.
Since I got there before Roger, I built the radio out and hopped on 15 meters CW and started calling CW POTA and got some really interesting answers to that call! I worked a station in the UK as well as Germany! The Hamstick is not the worst antenna out there is what I have some to understand. If conditions are not too bad, I can easily work Europe and South America on 15 meters above. Today was no different. I was able to get a couple of DX stations as well as K2E special event station!
Once Roger arrived we switched over to SSB and attempted to make some contacts first on 15 meters, and then 17 meters with literally zero answers on SSB. You see, Roger is still working on his code so he prefers SSB at this time for things like this. So rather than frustrate him with having to listen to code he is struggling with, I opted to set the hook deep and get on SSB.
I think my idea worked, he was really stoked to work so many ops in such a short time. We had a blast and everyone was super nice while we bumbled around handing the mic back and fourth. It was hilarious at times, but we had fun so I am happy. It happened so fast that I had to come up with some really fast shorthand to know which calls we had given “Two Op status” to and which ones I worked by myself. Plus the notebook was also the wrong one and the calls were happening so much faster on SSB, the notebook is a mess.
I can honestly say that taking a second op along to do multi-op POTA is really fun and if you have not done it yet, consider giving it a shot sometime.
The below photo shows you what it looks like to make sure you are hydrated on these hot summer days in Georgia. I have a Nalgene bottle which I am using first since it is not insulated and then a Hydra-flask which is insulated and makes for cool water even when it is burning hot outside of the bottle. On top of that we were drinking coffee while there too, that is just silly if you think about it…
This is the messiest logbook I think I have ever created. Notes just scribbled here and there, edits run roughshod through out the 5 pages, and you can see that it means we had a great 4th of July activation. Thank you to all the hunters that came out to support us on the air and I look forward to recreating something like this again in the near future.
73
David - WK4DS