For a while I have been thinking about participating in
Parks on the Air. This is an
amateur radio program promoting outdoor activity by letting people activate
park locations all over the world by making contacts from that special location
and having other people chase these contacts. Both of these activities will
collect points making for ranked lists and certificates which can be collected.
The treshold for a succesfull activation of a park in the POTA program is low:
only 10 contacts from a park between 00:00 UTC and 23:59 UTC are needed. This
makes activating multiple parks in a day or as a lunchtime activity possible.
I have been watching videos about Parks on the Air, from
KB9VBR Antennas
and the official
Parks On The Air
YouTube channel. And I like to read posts about POTA activations on peoples'
websites and social media. But I needed to stop doing theory about this and
do an actual activation myself. I mentioned yesterday on mastodon
Lots of radio amateurs active from summits/parks! I must go do this myself in a nearby park
and got positive responses where I mentioned
@ei8kd I have the gear, I just need to find time to be away from the family and kick myself out the door.
Conclusion: time to stop thinking and start doing. Today was the chance: no
plans for the afternoon and the rest of the family was doing things at home and
didn't mind having me leave the house.
So today I wanted to do my first POTA activation at a nearby park:
Noorderparkruigenhoek National Park
which has never been activated in morse.
In preparation I have the gear with choice between the
linked dipole antenna
on the
fiber mast
for 15/20/40 meter band
or the
multiband vertical antenna
tested for the 20, 17, 15 meter bands.
I bought/built the multiband vertical to be easily deployable in situations
like this, so I packed that. And a sealed lead-acid battery, the FT-857D radio
including microphone, a small CW key, antenna cable, power cable, headphones,
a notebook and pen. And the smartphone with the
Ham2K PoLo BETA
logging app.
I packed the gear in the bag I normally use for taking my laptop to work.
It turned out the bag with the heavy equipment was too heavy to hang from the
back of my recumbent bicycle so I used the bicycle trailer.
In the park I searched for a place to set up. It would have been nice to
find a parkbench a bit out of the way but parkbenches are set up for people
who use the main walking/cycle paths and they all had people sitting there.
So I found a grassy area within the park and started to set up the antenna
and the radio. This was somewhat close to the high voltage line running
through the park.
I first set up the antenna for 15 meter CW. The radio kept complaining about
the standing wave ratio, but this was fixed when I connected the antenna
cable to the radio.
Giving CQ with the small CW paddle gave problems, the paddle kept adding a
dash after certain dots. It seems the small CW paddle was set too tight,
pressing on it made it also send out dashes. After tapping on it a bit and
moving it around the top of the radio where it was sitting (with magnets)
made that problem go away.
This made giving CQ as
PE4KH/P hard so I decided
after a few tries to make it easier and use my call
PE4KH
without the 'portable' modifier. Sending morse with the paddle wasn't easy, I
haven't practised much lately, I'm used to using the computer with the radio at
home.
But: nobody came back to me on 15 meter CW. I spotted my activity on the
pota.app site but that didn't change things.
I switched to 17 meter CW where there was some more activity. I called CQ in
morse a number of times. I also spotted myself on the pota.app site on that
frequency. It sometimes seemed a call came back to me but they seemed in a
different contact, maybe there was a DXpedition working split.
Also in voice on the 17m band nobody came back and people I tried calling
didn't hear me.
After that it was time to pack up and go home to be in time for dinner
preparations.
One thing I wanted to avoid was people asking questions or reacting negative to
me being busy with radio which is why I searched for a spot out of the way, but
reachable by walking my bicycle over there. I saw several people walking dogs
near where I sat, but nobody seemed to mind. Some people said
'good afternoon' and left it at that.
In the end: 0 contacts. But a learning experience. And I finally did that
first activation attempt I had been (over) thinking about for ages.
Things learned:
- The radio plus battery (and other gear) is too heavy to hang from the
(lightweight) luggage rack at the back of my recumbent bicycle.
- I can find a spot in that park
- Headphones don't work with a hat in the sun
- But earbuds are fine for radio outdoors, there is not a lot of noise
around
- I need to check the HF bands before such an activity, to know where to
start and what antenna to bring
- On the 15 and 17 meter band the multiband vertical works fine
- Having the 40 meter band available during the day can be helpful for
days with bad propagation
- I need to have a list on paper of POTA frequencies on all bands I can be
active on
- That same bit of paper could also have the standard lines to send
- I need to practise more with sending morse by paddle
- People with dogs don't mind other activities in the park
- The multiband vertical antenna isn't very obtrusive in a field of high
grass
- I like having a notebook to write down calls when I first hear them, but
logging will probably be nice with the Ham2K PoLO app.