Today we were blessed with good weather... (actually it was pretty warm!) Great day to be at the park! Good day to experiment and have fun! I made a Carolina Windom antenna to test out. I have never ran an antenna off-center fed with a 4:1 balun, so
Last night I decided to try to build a new 15M Delta Loop antenna. I wanted to try a new design and a hammer out a new band for POTA. Just to be different. I built the antenna figuring it would work on 15M and maybe 12M or 10M. Well
I started the day out making a 20m 1/4 wave "Fishing Pole" vertical antenna since I have not deployed a HF vertical in several months. I cut 16'4 inches of 18ga "speaker wire" for the vertical element and four ground radials at around
Big day! First Park Activation for my new gear. FT-891 and new 23AHr battery out for inaugural runs. And boy - did it run! The 42 contacts came quicker than I could type and a total of 29,000 miles of airwave travel in under an hour! The radio worked
POTA activation today at US-1038 Chewacla State Park using the sBITX+ and a linked EFHW. James joined Ken and I to take a look at what a POTA activation is all about. It was a day of gremlins and strange issues. But we both got our activation in! Here
Last night my new rig, the Yaesu FT-891 arrived. Today was time to get it dialed in and make some contacts. It was fun hunting down parks with a new tool. Here is the map and details (First contact was with a station on the Golf Coast in Texas)
Three great things today: First of all, finally made a round trip email->reply->reply to another HAM in Arizona over Winlink. Super cool to send a message this way. Second, we had a local SIMPLEX test on 2M. Good to see how far 2M will go. Third,
Today I hooked up the uSDX+ and ATU100 Tuner to the 20M inverted V antenna to experiment with FT8 and Winlink. Made a couple of Winlink connections last night and this morning, farthest hop was around 800mi for Winlink. For FT8, I had a South Africa station respond to my
POTA award for activating first week of 2025!
First day of 2025 and a tail of a different Coconino County! The Last POTA was in the forest at 7000'. Today is more of a dry desert at 4000'. Same National Forest, but this time in the Red Rock area. Two POTA activation attemts today at two
Trying FT8 POTA on 10M @2.5w in Coconino National Forest. Here is the setup: PARK: US-4428 ELEVATION: Approx. 6,400 feet RIG: uSDX+ HF with ATU100 tuner ANTENNA: 10m EFHW 9:1 BATTERY: 12v Car Battery Map and detail of POTA activation:
Made it to the Arizona Trail near C.C. Cragin Lake in the Coconino National Forest. This is a pretty high plateu at around 7300+ feet elevation. (my iPhone GPS said I was at 73,330' - what a bug!!!) Targeting 20M, I did get one contact on 15M @ 1.
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Evening POTA FT8 Coconino National Forest It is dry here... Here is the setup: * PARK: US-4428 * ELEVATION: 6,500 feet * RIG: uSDX+ HF with ATU100 tuner * ANTENNA: 20m EFHW 9:1 * BATTERY: 12v Car Battery Propergation on 20M was very good tonight. Within minutes, I had 5 contacts on
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My first Arizona POTA activation. I used 9:1 end fed antenna and the sBITX running at <10w. Made 3 phone contacts and a bunch of FT8. Here is the setup: Here is the activation info:
QRP
Experimenting with the Chineesium HF Rig today... here is the setup: 20M @ 2.8W out of the tuner SWR=1.17 10M @ 1.4W out of the tuner SWR=1.2 on a not so greatly tuned 20M antenna. USB to PC running WSJT-X for FT8 ops. Today was
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Today was a day in history for me... Mark this day down as my first: * POTA Activation with my own gear. * POTA Activation using the new sBITx Radio. * First TX from the new sBITx Radio. * POTA Activation covering the FT8 Digital mode. * Use of my home built end fed 1/
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New Radio Alert! My Gigaparts order just arrived... I am excited about the possibilities of this hacker type HF rig. POTA? Digital? HUGE SCREEN!
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Interesting airwave pipeline up the Appalachian mountain range this morning. There is a weather front moving in that same direction.
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After getting the POTA bug, I decided I wanted a portable rig to take to the park. There are generally two radios that keep popping up on YouTube for this application: The Xiegu G90 and the Yaesu FT-891. After doing research on both radios, I kept mulling over the
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Different arcs of parks today...
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Today’s QSL’s and #potahunting. Early morning was pretty clear shot up and down the East coast.
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Good #POTA hunting contacts today. 10M/15M have been good band for me lately. Two more DX POTA parks!
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Early morning 10M was clear to Europe for #POTA. I am amazed at what a ~53′ wire in the back yard can do! I am thinking that arc of parks in the Euro zone are all about where the 2nd or 3rd bounce of signals land as the skip across
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NEW RADIO ALERT! My first ownership of a "big rig" (not those little HT things!) Gigaparts had a sale a few days ago on the Yaesu FT-991A at the lowest price I have seen. After using Ken's 991A, really became at home with this great