I recently activated US-1313 while on a camping trip to Powhatan State Park near the center of the state of Virginia. Band conditions were good and while I am yet to do much operating on SSB or CW, FT8 came through for me as always and allowed me to activate the park twice in one sitting. I hadn’t paid much attention to when I started working at the camp site, but I must have done so between UTC midnight because I got enough QSOs to activate the park on Saturday UTC and then again on Sunday UTC before calling it a night locally.
I was a little bit disappointed in the campsites at Powhatan State Park when it comes to availability of antenna deployment options. When we visited, it was mid-Spring and all while the campsite was clear of weeds and such, the perimeter of the sites were not. This prevented me from being able to deploy my end-fed antennas into any of the surrounding trees unless I wanted to be covered in ticks, which I had no desire to be. With the wire antenna option out of the game, I deployed my Wolf River Coils Silver Bullet Platinum Take-It-Along (TIA) kit and tuned it up to present a low SWR for the 20m band. I’m really liking this antenna kit for its easy of tuning and quick deployment capabilities. It also is space efficient if you have a decent number of radials which allow you to keep them shorter than the three 33-ft radials that come with the kit. I use sixteen 14-ft radials with this antenna and believe it or not, they are easy to deploy and if you wind them up properly after use, they never get tangled. I use three groups of radial wires attached to each leg of the TIA tripod and this seems to work quite well for me so far.
While I was not able to deploy and use the end-fed antennas like I had hoped, I did put up the new N0APX EFHW Biscuit momentarily while desperately trying to find a suitable wire antenna deployment configuration at our campsite. I connected it to my RigExpert AA-55 Zoom analyzer and found that the antenna is long, but I expected this as Andy, N0APX states he leaves the antenna long so that it can be tuned for each operator’s needs. I need to take this antenna and my other end-fed from HF Kits out to a community park near my QTH and just get them tuned and deployment-ready.
I’d rate Powhatan State Park campground a 7 out of 10 for POTA activators who want to work the park as they enjoy a camping trip. I would have preferred more trees being accessible to me at the campsite for antenna deployment. We walked around the campground and it appeared that this issue was probably not present for some of the other sites. Ours just happened to have a lot of weeds and overgrowth around the perimeter of the pad. I took notes of other possible campsites to reserver for next time.
All in all, the camping trip and POTA activation were both successes. The nearby James River is a great one for kayaking or canoeing if you’re interested in that. We rented a pair of kayaks from a nearby outfitter and paddled several miles along the length of river adjacent to the park. That was a lot of fun.
While conditions were good for playing radio, the majority of my QSOs were stateside. I was excited to get K7AGE in my logbook. Randy taught me how to terminate Anderson Powerpole connectors via his Youtube channel long ago.
Until next time, 73.
K2MAS
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