Back in May of 2023 I visited San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge (US-0212). At the time, I was escaping the cold and drizzly weather in San Francisco as described in this earlier blog post.

There aren’t facilities here to support large groups so I was pretty confident that the place would be overlooked by the Labor Day celebrating masses.

I was quite surprised when I arrived, finding what was a lush grassy field in Spring took on a desert look now in late Summer.

The photo above is from my springtime visit a year ago, while the photo below is from today, taken from roughly the same viewpoint.

The grasses are dried up and plowed under. This land is protected under the Sonoma Land trust, so while it may be under agriculture it will never be developed.

Not really excited about eating lunch and activating in front of a dry, dusty field of dirt we followed the Bay Trail for a short way, across the S.M.A.R.T. train right of way and up to the levee that overlooks San Pablo Bay.

The levee features some informational signs, a kayak launch, and importantly, several benches placed there for city folk that come out to the country to activate POTA.

I started out just using the whip on the KH1, but after hunting W5MTN in Arizona and getting a pretty weak signal report I concluded that a little more antenna was in order.

Not being in the mood to put up anything more elaborate, I bungeed a tenkara rod to the adjacent bench and ran up the Polystealth wire I use with my 20 meter EFHW.

I didn’t bring the 64:1 transformer and instead attached the wire to a BNC binding post. The internal tuner on the KH1 handled this just fine with a 1.7 to 1 SWR match. Good enough.

I don’t really know what propagation conditions were like today, but the activation was strictly a western states affair with QSOs mainly from the Pacific Northwest. Although there was cluster of Southern California contacts, which is unusual for me on 20 meters.

The main takeaway is that this particular location has a whole different character depending on what time year you visit.

73 de W6CSN

After all of the families and tourists decided to call it a day, it was time to head out to The Presidio of San Francisco (US-7889) for a little bit of POTA fun with the Elecraft KH1.

I parked on Lincoln boulevard across the street from the National cemetery. Here, an old pre-WWI gun battery has been uncovered and restored to “Battery Bluff Park” with green grass, nice picnic tables, and beautiful vistas of the Bay and Golden Gate.

The place was deserted, giving me a choice of operating positions. Taking one of the small square tables, I set up the Elecraft KH1 using the Tufteln right-angle adapter to hold up the 4 ft long whip antenna.

With such a short antenna and coming off some challenging solar conditions, my expectations for this activation were pretty low. I might struggle to get QSOs and maybe from only from across the Western states. I was fully prepared to come out again early the next morning if I failed to gather the 10 contacts needed before dark.

Despite persistent attempts, the ionosphere continues to defy my attempts to predict its behavior. Not only was the POTA activation complete in under an hour, I worked some east coast stations that were LOUD!

AD8J came back to my call on 20 meters with a signal that was so strong that I assumed he was a local, like line of sight local. When I asked for his QTH, he responded with “NC.” John was clear across the country in Asheville, North Carolina!

Karen in Virginia, Eric in New Hampshire, and Michael in Pennsylvania all had FB signals this evening, although QSB created limited windows of opportunity for these cross country contacts.

With 11 QSOs in the log, it was time to wrap this pleasant evening POTA activation with the KH1. Just a couple of minutes to pack up and I was on my way.

73 de W6CSN

This trip across Utah was on the return leg of our western states road trip that took us as far east as Colorado. Our first time in Utah, several days earlier, followed a route further north in the Logan area through the Cache Valley.

On this return leg, we spent the night in Salt Lake City and got started driving again around mid-morning. Back on I-80, we spotted the sign for Great Salt Lake State Park (US-3075) and my XYL requested we stop and have a look.

I already had Utah in the bag with my earlier activation of Bud Phelps WMA in Logan and didn’t really intend to collect another park in the state. But we’d paid the park entrance fee and it seemed silly to not at least attempt an activation. When am I going to be back at the Great Salt Lake?

After looking around a bit at the lake, which we found to be generally underwhelming, I grabbed the KH1 and setup up on a picnic table with a Tufteln right-angle adapter holding up the 4 foot whip. The counterpoise was simply tossed out toward the lake.

With deteriorating propagation conditions and a very short antenna, it took more than an hour to gather up the 10 QSOs needed for a complete activation. The last several contacts came from hunting other POTA/SOTA ops.

With the activation complete and the discomfort of the hot weather around the lake, we hopped back into the air conditioned car to continue our westward journey home.

73 de W6CSN

It is not uncommon for California to experience a spell of warm weather in late January or February with temperatures rising into the mid-60s °F. This typically occurs when high barometric pressure builds over the eastern Pacific and into the Pacific Northwest, causing an offshore wind flow over California.

With the warm temperatures came a wonderful display of altocumulus clouds throughout the day. In fact, the real reason this activation gets a blog post is to show some pictures of the pretty clouds!

Enough about the weather, let’s talk radio. The FT-818 has been getting a lot of use recently. While it does lack a built-in antenna “tuner” and CW message memory, it’s the closest I have to a shack-in-a-box. And, it’s the only portable HF radio I presently have that goes above 20 meters.

Collapsing the lower three and a half sections of the MFJ-1979 telescoping whip, I am able to get a good match on 15 meters, which is where I started this activation. By operating on 21MHz late in the day, my hope was to get some Pacific-rim DX as well as the more likely stateside QSOs. The strategy paid off with three Japanese stations responding to my CQ POTA calls. Sigs weren’t strong, but with some persistence we were able to complete the required exchange of callsigns.

Next, I tuned the radio to 20 meters and fully extended the whip antenna for a one-to-one match. The N0NBH space weather report on qrz.com showed the geomagnetic field to be in “unsettled” territory and QRN on 14 megahertz was getting up to S5. Nevertheless, propagation was still quite good with calls from all over the USA, Canada and Alaska.

With the sun dipping below the western bluffs of the Presidio of San Francisco, I sent a final QRT after one last call from N4GO in Kentucky. El Niño winters can bring a mixed bag of interesting weather to Northern California and today’s “t-shirt” weather was perfect for getting out for a little outdoor amateur radio.

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