One of the reasons I like POTA

The first picture is one of the main reasons I like POTA. Being out in the field with a portable radio and being able to make a reliable contact with it is just special to me.

The parking lot was almost full when I arrived and fortunately for me, the space I wanted was open! That is me all the way over to the left at the end of the row. The perfect spot to be if others are in the lot as there is no trail here so no one will be tripping over the antenna parts when the come and go.

Today I found I had about an hour of free time and the weather was perfect for a change so I gathered up the gear and went to K-2169 for a quick activation. Since the weather was so nice I opted to setup on the tailgate.

When I operate at home, I am in my “shack” which is actually a spare bedroom I have repurposed for my hobbies. That is the one thing I like and don’t like about it. It is indoors. I like it when it is raining or cold outside but I don’t like it when it’s nice weather outside. This is the biggest reason I like going to Field Day in June, that is second only to the camaraderie with the other people.

Today, since I wasn’t in my regular truck (I commandeered one of my shop trucks while they put new shoes on the dodge) I didnt have my usual antenna kit. So today I deployed the 41’ random wire antenna that I used in Hawaii. I also coupled it to my Icom IC-705 with the automatic antenna tuner as well. This makes band changes a breeze…

I threw a line over a tree beside the truck and pulled the wire up as high as I could and tied on a 13’ counterpoise. The tuner connects to the radio with two cables, a co-ax transmission line and a signal/control cable that is simple a 3.5mm stereo cable commonly referred to as a “AUX” cable. It has two AA batteries in it and works fine with these but if possible I will power it with the main battery I feed the radio with, so I also included a power cable in my harness I made up for it. This harness is 6’ long and allows me to connect random wires right to the tuner.

To lift the burden of the wire tension off of the tuner, I also have a small cord connected to the radio end of the 41’ wire so I can anchor it to something near the tuner. This works really well and keeps me from pulling the tuner off the table when something moves the wire like wind, squirrels or people which in turn would cause damage to my tuner.

Today was a pretty good day too, I got my activation in a fairly short amount of time, I was outside in the wonderful weather and I was able to just play radio a little while. That being said, I netted less than 20 QSOs today with signal reports showing I was not very strong…probably because the wire was poorly deployed and not even all the way.

The key of choice today was once again the Gemini I picked up off of eBay a while back. I have ran into two problems with it since getting it. I also use it a lot as it has a great feel and normally works very well. Issue number one is detailed in a previous blog post where I bumped the lever arms at some point and this shifted the action off center causing it to send dits nonstop. I dismantled the key and realigned the lever arms, which is really easy once you see what needs to be done. The second happened just the other day during an activation. I got all setup and started to call QRL and it was just sending trash. I couldn’t get it to send anything correctly at all, just a mess of dits and dahs with no coherent outcome. So I fell on the backup, the N6ARA key and it saved the day. Once back home, I took the key apart to find that the center ground post that the contacts touch when keying, had worked loose and it was about to fall out. It has one small screw that holds it on the base plate and I simply tightened this screw and it was back in business. The lesson here is to have a spare key with you…fortunately I had one and was able to get the activation.

Looking at the map, we can see how the radiation pattern started about 700 miles away probably due to my terrible antenna deployment, but people were still able to hear me so that is all that mattered. lol…

Do you have any tales from the outer planets that relate to anything like what has happened here? If so, let me know in the comments. I look forward to working all of you on the air at some point.

72 de WK4DS

Today I activated the smallest park I have personally ever seen.

This activation included me having to use my backpack rig in its entirety. I used the ICOM IC-705, wire antenna and the rest of the whole kit from the normal pack I use.

I have been wanting to activate this park since we arrived in Tampa over a week and a half ago, but the park is closed on certain days and I had to arrange it to where I would be in Ybor city, and the park would be open at the same time…with good weather. Today was that day.

I even found a good parking space relatively close to the park and only had the walk about one block. This is unusual for me, as I am never able to find parking that is even remotely close to the location I want to go. So the Lord was already looking down on me on this day.

So this park is really nothing more than a museum with a large patio area that is also fenced with a huge brick and wrought iron wall, on the side of the museum. It sits on about 1/2 of one city block of space, this includes both “park” and building.

So today it is only me, a chicken and the park employees who were cleaning the fountain while I was there.

Ybor city has some sort of ordinance that protects the chickens, and there are chickens literally everywhere.

So in order to draw less attention to me and to not risk getting thrown out of the park for putting antennas in the trees, I opted not to throw a line into the trees to haul up an antenna, but rather instead, ran it across the back corner area and fixed the end of the antenna to the top of the fence gate as shown in the photo.

I ran the radials along the ground. I know this is not a very good setup, but I really only wanted to get the activation and then go shoot some photography as well.

Well, I started on 15 meters since I could see it was open and actually made several contacts there before moving to 17 meters. 17 meters actually netted me some contacts today too!!! Boy howdy! Today, even with my terrible antenna setup, I have landed an activation and still have yet to goto 20 meters. This is in large part to a team of dedicated hunters who are listening with good receivers and MUCH better antennas than what I am using. 20 meters netted several more contacts and I shut down after 50 minutes.

Way back over there in the back is where you can see the table that I used for the activation. It is kinda nice to have a big table to spread all the gear out on when you are doing an activation. Plus, in the middle of the day there is little to no activity in this park so I didn’t have to share space with anyone else too. If I could have escaped the band noise, and put the antenna in the tree (to be honest I probably could have if I had just done it quietly) and it would have been an epic activation.

The whole rig packs really neatly into this old camera bag. Thanks to KV9L for the idea on repurposing a camera bag for my POTA gear. That was genius of him and I had about 4 bags just sitting in the corner not being used at all…

I tied the end of my wire to the top of the wrought iron fence (which I think is actually aluminum but who’s checking?) and then laid it on top of some bushes in between my radio tuner and the fence to get it off the ground a little. I am obviously getting some capacitive coupling with the fence and this may be why I got as many contacts as I did. I also used 10 watts and not 5 today for all but 2 of the contacts… I know it says 5 on the log, but I made the note, that after the second QSO I turned it up to 10 after I took this photo. Something quite rare for me is to run more than 5 watts, but as you can see in the reports, people were barely able to copy me and then it was much easier after that with 10 watts. Once things got going I forgot to turn it back down and so you have it… From the map below, it looks like decent single hop propagation and since I was running such low power and a terrible antenna, I am happy to see even this many contacts.

Got K9IS in the log on two different bands today, that is kinda cool and I am starting to recognize several other calls that are showing up in my logs more and more. K4RUM, W8NGA, and WA9VFD area calls I have seen before that I am aware of, I am slowly trying to put names to these calls too as I like to learn the first name if possible. This is just something I like to do.

This is the remote tuner for the IC-705, It is designed to be used with it and it is actually designed to be strung up in the trees as a remote tuner. I made up a 6 foot cable for it that has the power, tuner control and coax all in one cable so it stores more conveniently. It is rolled up in the bag photo on the top right corner of the bag, I just used the spiral wire loom to make up the cable, that way when one of the three cables wears out, I can replace it easily.

Here is the view from the end of one of the radials to the tuner module. I ran two 10’ radials in opposite directions to help the wire get out.

The antenna ran up to this fence section across those bushes, so as you can see, it was really low to the ground. This still got me an activation though so I am happy with it.

You can see the park employee in the background where they were cleaning the fountain. This is why I didn’t bother putting up a wire or even asking about radio, since I was running CW, I wore headphones and I don’t think they even knew what I was doing. No one ever came over to see…

Here you can see the power setup for running the external battery, I run a power distribution block with power poles so I can plug in the tuner and the radio power, then I run them through a power meter back to the battery. Both the radio and the tuner have separate fuses for them so none of the devices are powered without fuse protection.

There was a good bit of rf hash in the area, but then again, there are numerous neon signs and no telling what else in the area, it is right smack dab in the middle of the city here so all bets are off here… I could still hear pretty well once I dialed the filters in a little better.

All in all, it was a great activation and I am happy to add Ybor City Museum to my list of parks. I think I have activated as many parks in Florida now as I have in Georgia! LOL Anyway, get that radio out and power that sucker on!!!

72 (well this time I was using 10 watts so 73 haha)

David WK4DS

What have I learned from documenting my antenna position?

The short answer … nothing world changing really.

But honestly I have learned a lot about what it takes to make contact with a QRP radio. The most important part is you setting up the radio and trying to make contact with it. I know this sounds obvious but it is often overlooked as people will look at the band prediction information like the space weather forecast and such and get paralysis through analysis from, this. They will not even bother to turn on their radio. This is a sad result that generates no activity and creates a group of operators that do not operate…

The next best thing I have learned from doing this small experiment is that I was not collecting near enough data to have a informed answer in any way, shape, or form. I was literally only recording my transmitter power, the signal reports (and this is totally subjective and not accurate really), and the antenna direction then generating a QSO map of my contacts from that time. This is not enough information to have any sort of relevant value to even bother with documenting the antenna position or elevation or any of that stuff. What I did learn though is that the antenna elevation and the counterpoise make a large difference and how well the antenna performs if you’re using wire antennas. I would attempt to get the wire as high in the trees as possible and it always seemed that the radio would here and talk much better when I did.

Antenna direction

I posted once on Facebook about this phenomenon of antenna direction and the location of the contacts and a reply was made that I had a omnidirectional contact chart mainly because I was where the radio operators were also at. This was said as a joke but it actually had merit. This actually made a lot of sense. What the charting of my contacts does show is that there is almost 0 NVI (near vertical incident) with wire antennas strung in the trees. Almost all of my QSO contacts are several hundred miles away usually showing that the near vertical incident is almost nonexistent with my wire antennas.

What this has basically taught me is that even if the prediction is for poor band conditions get out and try anyway this will normally result in you at least making a few contacts if not getting an activation in a park or just having a good time in general you don’t have to sweat it too much just get the wire up in a tree put out a counterpoise of some form and the antenna will do its job once you tune it with a tuner. It’s all the better if it is a resident antenna anyway as you do not have to tune this antenna to be able to use it.

Antenna Direction

Parks on the air is a wonderful activity and I really would recommend you try it out if you have not done it already it is a lot of fun and I get to operate QRP radio in the park and I’ve become the DX! This is something that I have never experienced under normal operating conditions as a US amateur operator. It is literally not something that happens to me normally. So if you want to try out being the “DX” this is an easy way to do it without breaking the bank from having to travel lol