BREAKING NEWS!! K2MAS is now a Parks On The Air (POTA) activator.
Today was such a lovely day outside (partly cloudy, cool (59ºF) with a gentle breeze) and I had an itch to get out finally and do some POTA activities. I’d never done such a thing but I figured it can’t be too difficult and I’ve been dying to get some testing done with my new antenna gear.
I activated US-5510, Conway Robinson Memorial State Forest this afternoon by making 22 contacts on FT8. I used my new Wolf River Coils (WRC) antenna kit and my new FT-710 transceiver from Yaesu. I also used the opportunity to try out a new-to-me logging program called HAMRS, which is a multi-platform application that is very clean and modern and easy-to-use for logging your QSOs. I’m not sure it offers any benefit to me over my normal logging solution (MacLoggerDX), so I’m not sure I’ll continue using it long term. I will say that HAMRS is a really fine logging application, though.
It took me about 15 minutes to get my antenna deployed but that’s because I had to spend time untangling my radial wires which got tangled as I was unspooling them from the wire winder they were on. I put them on in the reverse winding when I packed things up so maybe the next time I use them, they don’t end up a tangled mess. The parking area where I was setting up is mainly for local outdoors walkers (I hesitate to call them hikers since it’s pretty flat here and any trail, even if it’s in a wooded area, is not going to be that challenging. These trails are like dirt sidewalks) and some mountain bikers. Maybe I should spend some time walking around on the trails here before I say much more. I may have to eat my hat.
After getting the radials untangled and laid out, I extended the 102″ collapsible antenna to its full length, checked that the WRC collar was near the top of the coil (the instructions say to start out there and you’ll be near the 20-meter band) and then attached my 25 feet of RG-8X coax to my RigExpert AA-55 Zoom antenna analyzer to see what things looked like. I found that I was around 1.2:1 on 21.074 MHz, which happens to be the FT8 calling frequency for 15-meters. “Well, that’s a pretty good coincidence” I said to myself and decided I was going to activate this park on 15-meters FT8 right then and there. It worked out perfectly, if I do say so. I could not believe how much better my signal reception was compared to working through a magnetic loop antenna set up indoors at home. I ended up making the 10 minimum required contacts within a few calls to CQ POTA. I almost got a bit overwhelmed trying to answer all the callers in the order I received them. This may have been due to working with the HAMRS logging software as I was trying to type in the callsign of the person I was sending a signal report to as I was receiving replies to my CQ POTA. I may have been doing too much at once. I’m confident that it’s just a matter of getting more practice, though.
I worked a good bit of Western European hams and managed to reach farther west than I had previous been able to from home. I had a successful contact from Art, W2PFA out in southern California. Eastward, my FT8 signals were successfully captured by Kosta, LZ1LZ in Bulgaria.
Noise floor readings on the S-meter were still around S7, which truthfully, isn’t unexpected. US-5510 is not far enough away from the DC metropolitan area to really start seeing a significant drop in QRM.
I’m planning another activation of US-5510 Conway Robinson Memorial State Forest soon. The parking area is surrounded by trees that looked like they were begging me to toss my new end-fed half-wave antenna up into them. 🙂 Maybe I’ll log more than 22 contacts next time and even work some SSB contacts into the log.
Until next time, 73.
K2MAS
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