You’d be forgiven for assuming all the posts on this website are either related to Parks On The Air (POTA) or Summits On The Air (SOTA) activations, but in fact, this blog is simply about “outdoor amateur radio.”

Today’s activity was just such a case of not POTA and not SOTA, just plain old outdoor radio. The driving factor was that today was Memorial Day, a day to honor the fallen, and traditionally, to spend some time outdoors, but trouble is that at my home QTH in San Francisco the skies were overcast and the temperatures expected to remain in the mid-50s. When the weather is like this, which is most of the summer, our family likes to escape to Marin or Sonoma counties to experience the warm weather that is uncommon in The City.

One of our favorite spots is Marin French Cheese Company factory and store, simply known as “The Cheese Factory” located in Hicks Valley near the Sonoma county line. Here they offer delicious cheeses made right there on-site as well as variety of picnic fixin’s to enjoy with your cheese. However, the main reason we go here is that the cheese factory offers its guests the use of their park-like grounds.

Most visitors congregate around a small pond and picnic area on the north side of the parking lot, but if you go around back, on the south side, there is a wide open grassy field dotted with full shade trees and plenty of picnic tables. Even on busy days, you practically have the place to yourself. If there are other groups, they are usually spread out enough that you still have plenty of space.

Now, about the radio activity. I’m making plans for an overseas trip later this summer and hope to have the opportunity to attempt a Parks On The Air activation while I am there. It would be very easy to bring the KH1, an entire station in a small “camera” bag. But I just got the KH1 after a six month wait for delivery and would be very upset if something were to happen to that radio while traveling abroad.

Slightly less convenient, but still quite small is the station consisting of the QMX multiband CW/Data radio, Gabil GRA-7350T base loaded vertical antenna and tripod, Talentcell Li-Ion battery back, and various connective bits. All of this can fit in my carry-on and still leave room for other travel necessities. And if something unfortunate happened to the QMX it’s not nearly such a big deal. The station could be replaced quickly and inexpensively.

I just needed to do a quick field check of the QMX station combination to verify that I can put it on the air in a park like setting, such as I am likely to encounter while traveling. The QMX is a high band model covering 20m through 10m which enables a smaller deployment footprint. I promise, there is no chance that I’ll be tossing wires into trees in a foreign park!

Previous activations have shown that when using the GRA-7350T on these high bands, especially above 14 MHz, that easier tuning is achieved when the 16 foot radials are folded back on themselves, effectively shortening the radials. Instead of folding them, I took one set of radials and cut them in half. There are two sets in this kit from when I thought I needed a lot more radials than I actually do with this antenna.

When hooking up the QMX to check the ability of the antenna to tune to a 50 ohm match with the shorter radial set, I realized that I forgot one of the power cables that connects the Talentcell to the QMX, doh!

I did have the cables needed to use the Bioenno LiFePo-4 pack with the QMX, but the battery was fully charged and supplying more than 13v, which the QMX cautioned against by flashing the battery icon to indicate the over-voltage condition. Well, shoot!

Fortunately I had another option. I brought along the KH1, because why not take the KH1 every where you go (except overseas)? With the internal autotuner bypassed, I could still test the tuning ability of the antenna system to provide a low SWR and be confident that when I use the tune mode on the QMX that I could achieve a similarly good match. I am not planning on bringing an antenna tuner.

The antenna tuned easily enough on 20m, 17m, and 15m using the KH1 as an RF source and SWR indicator. Naturally, I tried to make a few QSOs while I was proving the antenna system.

Normally when I do ham radio in the outdoors I am activating a park or summit, so I am the DX. But the cheese factory is neither a POTA park nor on a summit. I’m just a regular ham, outside, running QRP. I didn’t even have cell phone coverage out in the country, so I couldn’t look at the POTA spots page for stations to hunt. I would just have to do it the old fashioned way, by tuning around and listening.

I spent about an hour “on the air” hunting for stations calling CQ POTA or CQ SOTA. That yielded three QSOs, all on 20 meters.

W0ABE	Colorado	20 meters	20:25 utc
K7SHR	Wyoming	20 meters	21:12 utc
W6KC/VE7	British Columbia	20 meters	21:25 utc

While testing the setup on 17 meters, I didn’t hear a lot of activity but I did hear a JA working an Italian. I could copy both stations, the Italian was weak but the Japan station was pretty loud. EA3PP was calling from Spain, but QSB was enough prevent me from attempting a call. You can’t work ’em if you can’t hear ’em!

The logbook looks very different when I am not activating and don’t have access to spots info. A lot of callsigns written down, but not worked. When I work a station, the time notation becomes the indicator that I had a QSO with that callsign.

On the way back to the cold City, we stopped at Hicks Mountain Hens to pick up some freshly laid, pasture raised eggs. So I guess you could just as well title this post “Ham ‘n Eggs.” Ok, I am leaving now …

73 de W6CSN

The weather in San Francisco on Christmas Day 2023 was partly cloudy and dry, with mild temperatures in the upper 50s. Additionally, the space “weather” numbers did not contraindicate the likelihood of success for a low power radio activation.

Rather than being a full field report, this post simply notes the achievement in the Parks On The Air program of making 1000 contacts as an activator from a single park reference: K-7889 “The Presidio of SF National Historic Site.”

It took 67 individual activations averaging about 15 QSOs each, over a span of a year and a half to reach the 1000 QSO mark. The “Kilo” was a 5 watt CW contact on 20 meters with KB3A in Alabama. The station on my end was the Yaesu FT-818 running to a resonant quarter-wave vertical antenna.

My thanks to the all hunters that responded to my low powered “CQ POTA” calls over these past 18 months, including many “regulars” such as Paul KJ7DT, Mike N7WPO, Jim WB0RLJ (p2p), Mike AL7KC, and Steve KG5CIK.

73 de W6CSN

In this modern era of radio technology, where even analog radio is largely digital, we amateurs are accustomed to perfect signal quality all the time.

Nevermind the perfunctory 599s that are handed out during contests, for activities like Parks On The Air and Summits On The Air I believe most of us like to send and receive an honest RST report.

Although subjective, readability (R) and signal strength (S) are pretty well understood quantities. But what about tone, the T in R-S-T ? When was the last time you sent or received a tone value other than “9” (the highest value) ?

Last evening, at the end of one of my frequent activations of the Presidio of San Francisco (K-7889), I struggled to pull a barely readable and very weak signal out of the noise. For what it’s worth, the natural noise floor was very low, with the geomagnetic field listed as “Inactive” on qrz.com.

What made the signal particularly difficult was that it sounded quite distorted. The problem I faced was how to tell the OM that it sounded like his signal had been through a blender. The numbers in the Tone scale go from 1 to 9 but I did not have any understanding of the specific defects encoded by the scale. I needed to send a report, and quick, so I dashed out a “225” followed by “DISTORTED.” But I was unhappy that I needed to send an extra, unexpected word to explain the reason for the “5” tone.

Tone

1–Sixty cycle a.c or less, very rough and broad.
2–Very rough a.c., very harsh and broad.
3–Rough a.c. tone, rectified but not filtered.
4–Rough note, some trace of filtering.
5–Filtered rectified a.c. but strongly ripple-modulated.
6–Filtered tone, definite trace of ripple modulation.
7–Near pure tone, trace of ripple modulation.
8–Near perfect tone, slight trace of modulation.
9–Perfect tone, no trace of ripple or modulation of any kind.

http://arrl.org/quick-reference-operating-aids

When I got home I resolved to refresh my knowledge on the R-S-T system so that I could have it at my disposal while operating and on the rare occasion when a tone value other than 9 is warranted.

May your signals always be strong and pure.

73 de W6CSN