Look for my ME activation starting sometime tomorrow afternoon.  I'll be trying multiple bands on FT8; 20 and 40 phone.  I can also log those that check in to the digital net if I'm getting through.

I look forward to a QSO.  I still need ME.  I got it a few weeks ago but for whatever reason still hasn’t posted.  It is a hard to get state for me with qrp and other compromised setups.   It shouldn’t be but it is.

I didn't have a ME POTA contact until I got here.  Now I have three.  Couldn't get DC either at home, but I have that now too.

The mount location worked well for CB.  I checked the resistance from the vehicle body to the coax shield and it was negligible.  

My problem is the spare tire clearance isn't good for the fatter antenna mast.  If I was using a single band ham stick it would mount right up with no problems.

Next time out I will use the Great Lakes Antenna on my offset mount since it is just the radiator.  The PAC-12 in the pictures has its own base so it needs a separate cable and ground connection.  The GLA won't need a separate cable and ground connection, and can use the vehicle as a ground plane.

ME is one of the handful of remaining states I need for WAS.  But I probably won't get to play radio for a bit and the sun sets on you guys a lot earlier.

Now on the air

I keep missing you, I looked several times today.  10, 1, and just now.

I'll be on again, now even before diginet.

I keep trying, I thought you were done.  You've come up a bit.  Chris in Illinois is also calling you.   Edit, you came up from the mud to a nice 59

Tom, I heard you as well. 5-9 here.

Thank you for the report, you're a nice 59 too!
I have a bad path to Maine.  Hills Mountains near me I think.

HA, Chris you're in!  

Thanks Travis, next stop Hawaii!  Thanks for Maine!!!!!

Hope you're having fun on vacation!!!!!

You're running a nice activation Travis, keeping it moving just nicely.

I copy you as almost the loudest station . Lots of static for me.

It sounded like a pileup for some rare DX.  I figured midweek there wouldn't be much POTA activity or contests so the band would be pretty empty.  Down side is everybody is hunting you.  

I knocked out 15 FT8 contacts on 17/20/40 over an hour to see how everything was working.  The first contact was Ukraine.

2338 to 0052 I had 115 40m phone contacts.

I did this after fishing from 0600-1530.  I caught pike, pickrel, crappie, large and smallmouth bass, yellow and white perch, redear and bluegill.

That sounds like an awesome fishing day!

Thanks again for the contact and the heads up!  I appreciate it.   Funny thing is after you started there were two more activations in Maine!  Must have been a convention!


Let us know when you’re going to Hawaii!

I'll gladly start taking donations for a Hawaii HAM/SCUBA trip.  Hell, I'll put a G5RV on the top of Mauna Kea.  The 1 activation there only had 30 contacts.



I checked my hunter log today and saw K7K there.  I wasn't sure if they had logged it or not, I never got a RRR/RR73.  Though it seemed like they may have been foregoing that to speed things up.  I never hit manual log button it so it wasn't included in my last LOTW upload.  It's likely I would not have been able to make the contact had I been at home.

I did finally get Hawaii a couple of days ago. First Hawaii station I have heard on POTA. so I have 51 confirmed now. (50 states +DC)
It took a lot longer than I would have thought. There just isn't many people activating in Hawaii, and this guy was from Wisconsin If I remember correctly. Locals in Hawaii don't activate parks as a rule.

I don't think I've ever heard that rule. Mine is with a local I believe. I'd have to go back and look. I just don't think there are many hams there much less those into POTA

I don't mean it is a "rule",  I meant it as a turn of phrase "as a rule".  Another way of saying "generally speaking". or "ordinarily".  I researched the activations of Hawaii, and it seemed to me that most of them did not seem to be residents. There are plenty of hams in Hawaii, but not all that many seem interested in POTA.  I have Hawaii confirmed on 10 bands including 6 and 160 meters,  and all 3 principal modes CW, Phone, and Digital, So they are not all that hard to work. But it took months to work a POTA station on Hawaii.

It would appear you are correct, that there are not a "lot" of amateurs in Hawaii.  It seems about 3800.  I think Missouri has about 17,000

ETA, looked it up, Mo. has just over 15,000 and your state Texas has over 54,000.  So yeah, Hawaii at under 3800 is kinda sparse in Amateurs.

Hit 6565 this afternoon didn't do bad at 50. 20m was about the only thing working for me. Tried 40m and it was crickets aside from a couple.

I’m on 18.135 for a bit if anyone needs AK 17m

I'm listening really hard but still only hearing static, good luck out there.

I only made 2 contacts on 17m. CA and UT, I don't think I was making it to the east, at least I wasn't bumping the PA webSDR.

I'm sure everyone that gets a hold of you enjoys it, I know you AK guys are a lot easier than those people on those islands out west.

I only made 13 contacts yesterday, but at least 3 of them were guys that expressed that they needed Alaska. That’s often the case and I enjoy it.

Plus I get to chill on a beach where people pay to cruise too lol.

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That's awesome.

Stunning, even on a cool day here the swamp air is readily apparent.

I'll keep my ears out for you one of these days, I need to learn CW cause I can hear it when I test on SDRs all over the world.

he can just use an alligator clip to the outside of the connector. I do that portable a lot

1/4 wavelength counterpoise is pretty small for CB. You probably had enough metal to make it work

but with lower HF bands there isnt enough metal so what ends up happening is the vehicle capacitively couples to the ground under the vehicle and although there is no physical connection there is a capacitive connection that makes it work and the bigger the plate of that capacitor ( bonded metal in vehicle ) and the closer it is to the ground ( frame of vehicle ) the more efficient the coupling to ground is and the more efficient the antenna.

POTA in winter, how is it?

With the sun setting before 5pm in most of the US, what's POTA like in winter on daylight standard time?

Do you see more activators sticking around after dark?  More activators using 40 or even 80 meters?

A lot of guys convert to full time in-car operating if you're in colder climates.  And then there is less willing to stay out later after dark so late shifts slow down a little bit.

I still go out in the winter so long as it's not unbearably cold.  It's kind of nice really, you can sometimes have the park almost all to yourself because there's fewer regular visitors than during the summer.

As for bands, well I always use 40 and 80 meters so nothing really different there for me.

Depends on where you are in the country. In the south to the southwest we get more active since our weather improves.

Same just darker

Less in the northern states. It slows a lot as the winter chugs on up there. We can pick up the slack down here though. Same as they get more active in the summer and we tend to slack off. I already take 3 showers a day in the summer, don't want 4. Hours

if the WX is nice = picnic table / ft891/WRC

if the WX is not nice = TS480HX / TARHEEL II mobile

I activated my second park today, and it was a HUGE difference, and a bit of a long story.  But if you are bored enough, read on.

My last activation, if you read about it, I had my antenna ground isolated from the vehicle ground through an accidental oversight.  I also used a 5W QRP radio and it took a couple of hours to get the 10 contacts I needed.  I also had midnifht zulu time come and go between the contacts I made (12 total) and it was pure luck I had 2 on one side of it and 10 on the other and got the activation.

Anyhow this evenings activation had some problems as well.  I drove an hour to the park, and got my antenna set up and then realized I had forgotten my battery at home.

So, I picked up dinner, drove home and fed the wife and kids, grabbed the battery and headed back out. I was back at the park almost exactly 2 hours later, and got on the air maybe 10 to 15 minutes after that.

This time, I had the antenna mounted properly so the shield was connected to vehicle ground.  But what really made the difference is I brought along my 100W desktop radio, an FT-450D.  I set it to 60W and using the PAC-12 antenna, it was like a whole other experience.  I had an actual pileup a time or two.  

My logging is still not as streamlined as I want it to be.  I think I need to spend some time with Excell and make POTA activation log sheets that have maybe 15 big lines on them.  I also need to get a cheap digital watch that can do 24 hour time and set it to GMT just to have right there for logging.  I tried using HAMRS to log in real time and it was too slow.  

Anyhow the takeaway for me was 60W instead of 5 made the difference between getting a pileup and getting "you're in the noise floor" reports.  I am really going to have to consider installing a 100W mobile radio.  The FT-450D was big and unwieldy, but I just wanted to quickly see what more power would do, and it was an absolute game changer.  I think I'd only consider activating QRP again if doing FT8 and at an overnight campsite where I can spend a lot of time setting up a bigger antenna.  I also need to make some activation gear checklists to make sure I don't forget something important like the battery.

This time I think it was less than 15 minutes between my first QSO and my last one. I was in and out of the park in less than 40 minutes.

If I could get a ham stick to work on my tailgate and do an actual solid install of a 100W mobile radio, I'd be really set for drive-by activations, which is what I want to be able to do.  I think I am going to rewire the tailgate with a short RG8X cable going to a panel mount SO-239 on the inside of the tailgate.  This will let me easily replace the section of cable that gets bent back and forth when opening and closing the tailgate, and it will provide a convenient break in the feedline where I can install a tuner to make the ham sticks behave.

QRP is fun when the bands are in favor or mode so on. We all know that. Point I'm making is I don't mind doing QRP, but I don't want to be forced into it when 50 or 75 or even 100w will get me out there for contacts.

My activations have all had some pretty serious pileups with many giving me 59 reports.

I run 100 watts out of the 891 with my mobile screwdriver antenna with the extended fishing pole whip and no radials.

This last activation of K-1787 we had an even 50 contacts in 30 minutes. Setup time is 2 minutes, the same as teardown time.

We usually try to find a shady parking spot near a tree but one where we can keep the pole out of the tree. Shade of course will not be a factor come cold weather.

Battery is the 20 amp hour Lithium that you all showed me here that you were using from Amazon. $100. (thanks for the tip)

Running the 100 watts for 50 contacts came no where near depleting the battery. Neither did the 84 contact run a few weeks ago.
We made contacts on 20 meters, from Florida to Maine and all along the east coast. North to many in Canada, South to Louisiana an almost all of the southern states,
and West to AZ and California.  The best DX was Yellowknife up in VE8 land up at the artic circle. So I was pretty pleased with the coverage. Of course we had the typical skip zone of 20 meters so on close in contacts.

So as far as I can tell the power/antenna/battery situation is whipped.

Sure I could set up larger antennas, but this is so convenient, to do a "drive by". Get in get out get good reports and log a bunch and go home back in the AC.

I did my 2nd POTA yesterday on an island devoid of anything man-made. It gets completely flooded over at times, but currently the river is 2 to 3ft below normal and I think it even dropped a few inches over the day. The lack of water made for a very convenient site that would not have existed otherwise, but it made it more difficult navigate the river.

I started out with 40 phone and FT8 on several bands. Then moved to 20 phone. Midday day on 20 I got ND, NE, CO, TX, KS among some east coast qth. It was pretty slow going

Later in the day on 40 FT8 I started seeing some really strong signals so I figured it was time to go back to phone and it was non-stop action.  40 was packed with all the QSO parties so that's why I took advantaged of the AE portion.  I had contacts in every state east of the Mississippi river except ME and all of those along it except Iowa, plus PR and a bunch of eastern Canada.


I got a total of 65 FT4/8 contacts and 240 phone. 13 park to park on phone and a few more on FT8. 127 of the phone came in an hour and 12 minutes of late shift with moths swarming my laptop, with another 13 just before the change over and those were all in the AE portion of 40.  One general got a little excited, came back and let me know he screwed up.  One contact was a brand new /AE making his first contact in the extra range.

I even got a contact with one of the previous activators that went out there on a jonboat with another ham.  I far surpassed the previous activations.





G5RV hung between the camo pole mast and dead tree.

Yeah it was astonishing how much better 60W worked over 5W.  My battery was still at 13.3V, so 90% charge for a LiFePO4.  It's only a 12Ah battery.  

Another thing I noticed was the noise floor.  I was at least 1/2 mile from the nearest town and noise wasn't even registering on the S meter.  Some of the contacts were like 51.  Perfectly readable but very weak.  I think it was easier to work weak signals as an activator than as a hunter from home.

Absolutely for me too.  S9 noise at home is pretty normal.  None in the field.




For those that don't know and might be interested, their is new official Discord group for POTA.

I'll have to check it out. I don't have Facebook anymore so keeping up with the POTA goings on isn't as easy as it once was.

Cool activation

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Air

What do I win?

There is definitely air in there, but other goodies as well.

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Just about the perfect POTA rig

I still need to get a extension for my 891 mic.

I think it will be great.  I was pleasantly surprised that it's actually physically smaller than I expected by around 25% as a rough eyeball estimate.

I have a 3 day weekend coming so I am going to take a day and do a proper install with 12 gauge wire fused at the battery and get the mount put in at the top of the windshield.  I will also need to make a new coax cable to run up there as well.  

Alternatively, I could mount the radio somewhere else in the vehicle and just do the remote head thing, but finding a spot that isn't exposed to trail dust isn't easy.  Any place with good ventilation gets lots of dust exposure.

Really I might prefer to have the radio in a go box or protective frame and just connect it temporarily when I do activations so I retain the option to operate from a park bench, or take it on the ATV, etc.

Still need to figure out what will be the most comfortable and convenient while keeping options open.

You mean like the short one in the picture above to allow unplugging it without removing the control head, or a long one to allow mounting the radio chassis somewhere else?