I visited Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg, Maryland again this week to attempt my first CW POTA activation. I regretfully report that I did not succeed. I will state that success was within reach had there been fewer mosquitoes at the park. Much like my previous visit a few weeks ago to the park, this visit was hindered by a megaton of hungry mosquitoes wanting to pester me constantly. I feel like this park will be great in the cooler months when mosquitoes are less active.
The good news about this POTA attempt is that I managed to successfully complete a CW QSO, unassisted. In fact, I completed three such contacts! So thank you to KD5SMF, Mark from Oklahoma; N4WN, Mark from Florida; and NY4FD, George, also from Florida. I very much appreciate your patience with me as I’m sure I sounded like a complete newb.
This outing was also my first with the Explorer POTA20 and POTA33 masts that I recently purchased. I took out my NØAPX EFHW Biscuit and used the POTA33 to send the unterminated end up into the air and then tried to jury-rig the other end up into the air with the POTA20. Not the best deployment. My thinking was that I could possibly get the wire more or less horizontal and maybe have better luck with signals coming and going. No idea if that worked as I thought it would. What it did do was leave me with a broken antenna since I was not paying much attention to where the wire was as I was collapsing the mast and in the heat of trying to avoid further bombardment by the mosquitoes, I managed to get the antenna wire tangled in a tree limb. The only way to get the antenna out of the tree was to tug on it sufficiently hard enough and in doing so, I managed to rip the wire from the transformer. Luckily, I have a soldering iron and a newly purchased spool of 18 AWG antenna wire. Hopefully, I can salvage the transformer and return the antenna to its former configuration.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun even if it was for a short time. I am becoming more confident in my CW abilities so I expect to be using those skills more often now that I’ve broken the ice.
Until next time, 73.
K2MAS
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