That’s not an entirely true statement. I’ve lived in places where the weather was far, far worse but there is something about having a bright, sunny, gorgeous looking day (as seen through the window of a house) and walking out into high 30s / low 40s temperatures. Not horrible, but when one is sitting still, not as comfortable as I might like.
Yes, I was back out at West Branch SP – K-1999 this past weekend. I’m chipping away at that kilo and I’m in the last 200 contacts. If there were to be a day where it was sunny and in the 60s, I’m sure I’d sit there until I got it done. But with high wind and cooler temps, well, an hour or so is just about enough time sitting still.
On Saturday, I decided to take the Penntek TR-45L out with me. I left any other options at home so that I’d force myself to get re-acquianted with this rig. I’m glad I didn’t have a fallback position as it forced me to reckon with some things.
Initially, I paired my Sunday Driver rig with the AX1. I don’t have a lot of practice with the Z-match tuner and I fiddled with it for quite a while. The rig wasn’t happy with the SWR. I didn’t have my QRP SWR meter with me (tactical error) so I couldn’t tell if the rig was really unhappy or just enjoyed blinking the angry red light at me. I know that we’re talking about less than 5 watts here, but I really like this radio and I don’t want it to be sad. It felt like a good idea to change it up.
My backpack always has my end-fed half-wave tuned to 40-20-10 and a random wire antenna along with my throw line ready to go in a single pouch. Why? Because in a pinch, the random wire will do what I need it to do and the end-fed has never failed me.
Note: I’m not saying the AX1 failed me. I’m saying I need more time with the tuner to figure out how to keep everyone happy.
I pitched the end-fed up into The Tree on The Branch and got back to it. This was a place where plugging the end-fed into the clamp mount I have for the AX1 was really handy. It keeps everying nicely positioned. I’m sure I’ll hear about some law of antenna physics I’m breaking here, but stuff worked. Everything was just over 1:1.
I nabbed 14 contacts on 40-meters in about 30 minutes. It was pretty steady until it wasn’t. When 40 felt depleted, I moved over to 20-meters and picked up 16 more in short order. I did get a surprise contact from Alaska! NL7V was doing the heavy lifting on that contact for sure, but it’s in the log! It was a good spread of contacts and, as usual, the end-fed gave a stellar performance.
Here’s the QSO Map for the Saturday activation.
Having been a bit humbled by my experience with the TR-45L and the realization that I’m going to need to do some backyard portable hunting to get a better feel for this rig, I took my old buddy the IC-705 out with me this time around. I decided to stick with the end-fed antenna just to see what I could see. I was not disappointed.
Setup took a little longer. On Saturday, I got the throw line up in one shot. Sunday, I looked like a blooper reel. There was a lot of throwing before I had the antenna in place. It got where it needed to be and things were set up and ready to go shortly thereafter.
I’m not re-opening the discussion. I’ve decided that QRN is all natural phenomena include geese and, in this case, really loud winds. I was set up and running along on 40-meters and about 15 minutes or so into my activation, the wind started howling. The trees were swaying. There were whitecaps on the water. I zipped up my coat and put on my watch cap and got back to it. It became a challenge to hear over it, but I kept going.
It’s probably an important thing to say yet again, but the average activator probably isn’t relaxing on a beach somewhere. At least, not if they are activating a park in NE Ohio in March. I appreciate the patience of the hunters who have no idea that they’re competing with the environmental noises at an activation site. Thanks for playing along! And yes, I do know more than CQ, my callsign, and “?”.
After depleting 40 and 20, I decided to give 10 a chance before I packed up. It was pretty quiet on that band. And when the IC-705 isn’t hearing something, it’s probably not able to be heard. But just as I was about to give up, I heard a very, very faint call. After much back and forth, I made out DL3AZ. Germany. On 5 watts into a wire in a tree. That’s the wild magic of radio. I got a 519 and I’ll take it all day long. After that contact, it was dead air and time to pack up before my fingers got too cold to function.
Here’s what the QSO Map looks like.
I’m really looking forward to better weather, but until it gets here, I will keep heading out to the park 90 minutes at a time to enjoy some therapy in The Big Blue Room. It’s sometimes hard to remember what warm activations felt like – or ones where I would sweat! I know that they happen, but they feel like distant memories. They’ll be back soon enough.
Thanks for reading along and 72!
There are some things that people don’t understand about Rottweilers. Some of those things lead to a prejudice that can be debunked in under 2 minutes with a dog. First off, do you know why Rottweilers and Dobermans were the “Bad Dogs” in all the movies? Docked tails. Yeah. It’s hard to sell the idea that a dog is crazy evil if their tail is wagging furiously in a happy manner because they are executing a command for their trainer and, quite frankly, are super happy about it! It also helps when the dogs in question are incredibly smart working dogs with a long history of learning complex commands.
2 minutes with a Rottie will make clear that the best way to describe the breed is: clown. They’re silly. They love their families. They want to be close to their people all the time. But most of all, they want to play.
A tired Rottie is a happy Rottie. A great way to tire out a bit ol’ dog like that? A 7-10 km hike in the woods. They get to bump into other hikers for pats and they get to smell all of the smells of the woods. When they get home, they’re absolutely exhausted. That, my friends, is the desired outcome.
What’s that go to do with radio or POTA? Simple. My wife has a Rottie. I like to go to the park and play radio. She hikes the dog all over creation for about 90 minutes to 2 hours and I get to play radio. Everyone goes home happy!
On 11-Nov, we headed out to a trail at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It’s a spot where I’ve never played radio before. On this particular day, I took along the IC-705 and the AX1 as I continue to test my theories about this compromise of all compromises of an antenna. Last time, I’d been so pleased with my clamp that holds the antenna that I didn’t bring the little tripod. So what did I find? Cement tables that are 3″ thick. Not what I’d hoped for. But it’s cool. The clamp attaches itself quite nicely to the Peovi frame on the IC-705. Crisis averted! A new operational tactic was unlocked as well.
I did have something new to play with this time. I’ve been having a very personal, very silly crisis over headphones. I really, really hate earbuds. A lot. They are the worst thing to happen to headphones since their inception. But they’re lightweight and pack down to nothing. The other issue that I’ve had is that my cool Heil headset has two earphones. This leaves me unable to hear the sound around me. I don’t love that in a public setting because I hate being startled. The solution? A single earphone headset. I chose the Heil BM-17 IC. It gives me the ability to flip over to phone modes when I want to talk while providing me with a headphone so that I don’t spew my radio noise into the fresh, clean park air.
The headphones are great. Typical Heil high-quality sound. I love having only one headphone and that produced exactly the results I was looking for. Yes, the bright yellow is supposed to be an emergency communications thing but I see it as a way of telling which headset is mine and being able to find it if I drop it in low-light conditions. With two uses under my belt (hold on…we’ll get there) I’m all in all quite pleased with their performance.
The day was quite cool as it sat in the lower 40s temperature-wise. It was also overcast most of the time. I’m getting better at writing with gloves on, so that’s something. The bands were not cooperative. I squeaked out 10 contacts on 20m and 1 contact on 17m. 17 was dead silent. 20 at least had traffic on it. All contacts were CW this time out. Here’s what the QSO Map looked like:
After just over an hour, the very tired puppy and my wife returned from their hike. They got enough of a walk that the dog was flopped on the living room floor for most of the rest of the day. Mission accomplished!
Sunday was a Scouting event. When my duties as taxi were over, I grabbed my bag and headed off to West Branch State Park – K-1999.
There are definitely worse places to spend a Sunday afternoon in the cooler pre-winter days. The sky was clear and blue. The temperatures were in the upper 40s. It was very, very quiet. The wind was low. Everything was what I wanted it to be for a trip to the park.
This time around, I took the TR-45L and, again, the AX1. I love playing with this radio. The more I use it, the more I want to use it. There are things I’m still figuring out. There’s a lot for me to learn about the Z-match tuner, for example. I also need to spend more time with the filtering options. Each time out, it feels more like a friend, but I haven’t logged nearly the hours with it that I have with the IC-705. We’ll get there, I have no doubt about that.
I did put an L connector on the bottom of the clamp. There was no chance to test the success of that arrangement the day before, but on a Standard Issue Park Picnic Table, it worked exactly as I’d hoped. With the L in place, I can direct the cable so that there’s less fiddling around and less cable strain. Given that I had the connector in a drawer, it was a worthwhile experiment.
I took my time and over the course of about 2 hours walked away with 29 contacts on 20m. All of them CW. There were a couple of Park To Park contacts. And I even translated that fact as the other stations were telling me that they were a Park To Park! I feel pretty good about how my copying is proceeding these days.
An observation I have about the TR-45L is that the headphone jack seems is either not working correctly or I’m using the wrong kind of headphones. My guess is that I should either send an email to ask what I should be doing or crack it open and see what’s what with the jack itself. My known-good headphones (as well as the new headset) don’t work without a little fiddling on the phones jack but WILL work on the speaker jack on the back. It requires some attention outside of a park visit.
The TR-45L continues to perform well. I made a lot of contacts with less than 5 watts on 20m. Here’s what the QSO Map looked like:
Given the way I started this, you will notice a conspicuous lack of dogs for the second park of the weekend. West Branch opens some of its areas to hunting during this time of year, and I’m not a big believer in hiking around even in designated areas and wearing bright orange. It’s easier to avoid the situation entirely. Where I sit is in the open near a disc golf course and well outside of the boundaries for the hunters. The trails in the park run close to some of those areas. Again, easier to skip it.
I had two days of park fun as the cold begins to roll in for the winter. I’ve got the gear for winter activations as well and I will continue to get out. It’s really important to enjoy the time in The Big Blue Room when the sun is out.
72 de KC8JC!
The forecast for the week was just too good. It was warm and the sun was out. Friday was set to be in the 70s with mostly blue skies and light breezes and that’s exactly what it was. I took the day off and decided that, after getting a haircut, I’d head out to the park and play radio for a bit. It was to be a last hurrah for pleasant weather in 2023.
It seemed to me that a quick run out to West Branch State Park – K-1999 was in order. How could I not take the opportunity to spend the day at a quiet park in the great weather?
I got my end-fed into a tree pretty quickly. It wasn’t a single throw this time, but it got where it needed to be. The TR-45L sprung to life and 40m wasn’t in bad shape. I started to call CQ and had some quick contacts in a nice clump and that was how the activation went. There were rather long spaces between clusters of contacts. More than a few times, I got stepped on by someone who either wasn’t listening or simply didn’t hear me.
That’s really the only piece of frustration with QRP operation. There’s always someone out there who doesn’t hear you and will post up on the same frequency. I never assume malice when I can assume that they don’t hear me. Most of the time, I will pack up and move on, but on that particular day, people were dropping in on top of me during pile-ups and that made for a different kind of challenge.
I was in the field for about two hours, though not all of that was radio. It was quiet and pretty and conducive to walking around and enjoying the breeze. When I was on the air, contacts weren’t flowing like a contest, but I ended up with 26 of them. Not a bad day considering I was moving around the bands a lot more than I would normally do.
It was an impressive spread in terms of locations for contacts. Running less than the full 5 watts that the TR-45L can muster, I managed to get to Maine, Washington State, Texas, and Florida – among others.
Here’s what the QSO Map looked like.
The forecast held. Saturday, it was much cooler and cloudier. Sunday was that cold rain that chills one to the bone. I didn’t venture out after doing some yard chores, so Friday was the only radio activity for me. No complaints. It was a great way to spend a beautiful late fall day.
The ending days of October in Ohio come with unpredictable weather. Last weekend it was in the 30s and 40s with high winds and rain. Suddenly, the sun returned and temperatures bounced up into the 70s. Never had a Tuesday screamed for a little time out in The Big Blue Room like this one. It was impossible to resist.
There was a half-scribbled plan in my mind. Go out to West Branch State Park – K-1999, sit on the point near the water, and play radio for an hour if the timing worked out. It did!
The Elecraft AX1 was in the bag – that’s just how it’s going to be from now on – and the Chameleon whip lives in the trunk of the Jeep for the season (now that I’m not cycling to my park destinations as much). Given the conditions, the EFHW was really the best choice. The line went up and over the Magical Branch the first time! That’s rare and is a Good Omen.
The Magical Branch is so named because if I get the antenna up on that particular limb, it ends at the picnic table perfectly without having to adjust anything. It also seems to be where the best results happen. There’s probably some superstition in there along with the math, but it works.
With the antenna situated, I plugged it into my brand new, never been on the air Penntek TR-45L. That’s the Secret Squirrel thing I was talking about at my last activation post. My original plan was to try the new radio with the AX1 and let any natural chaos ensue. Toss everything I know to the wind! Maximize ALL the variables! But…the weather changed my approach and I stuck with the IC-705. It all worked out.
But hey! A new radio! Just what I needed, right?
I know that I’ve mentioned in this blog many times that when I first got into the hobby, I was looking for something that didn’t involve computers. The solar cycle in 2017, QTH, equipment, and life in general led me down the path to digital modes and hours upon hours of enjoyment. There are no complaints or regrets with how I’ve spent my time with my hobby.
That said…
I’m really tired of screens. Really, really tired. And lugging a tablet around always feels like business travel. So, my path changed. I followed a well-worn track up the mountain, so to speak. I think of it as an inevitable progression for a chunk of operators:
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POTA leads to QRP leads to CW.If QRP is your thing, you can fight it, you can run from it, but eventually, the road takes you to the neighborhood where CW lives. I’m glad I found myself there, because it’s challenging and rewarding.
Which brings us back around to the TR-45L. This radio popped onto the scene not that long ago and that gorgeous, old school amber meter on it grabbed me. It grabbed a lot of operators. To add to the aesthetic draw, the rest of it is all knobs and switches. Physical knobs and switches. No touch screens. No submenus to navigate. Everything is right there.
In thinking about what I wanted from the hobby, the tactile nature of some of the hardware was in there. When I was a very little kid, my Dad AC8NT made me what he called a “Gunkulator”. What was it? A rotary phone dial, some light-up buttons with numbers on them, a couple of oscillators, and an LED or two in a metal enclosure that probably came from Square D. When you dialed a number and pressed the button that matched it, it made a nice sound. It buzzed if you did it wrong. This was all before my brother was born so I was about 3 years old. The inevitable early 1970s parenting moment comes in with the big metal box off to the side that housed some God-Tier power supply with a fuse socket on the front. Ya know, the kind of fuse that you twist the lid and pull out? The kind of fuse that goes into a socket exactly the size of a three year old’s finger? I’ll leave the rest of the story as an exercise for the reader, but yes, I did have to change my pants. I wonder to this day how any of us survived the 70s, but here we are. Gen X: The Cockroach Generation!
Anyway…
This is not the blog to read if you’re looking for receiver sensitivity analysis. I’m not that ham. What I will say in praise of this radio is that it sounds wonderful and operating it is a dream. Every flip of every switch and every tweak of every dial is a pleasure. The speaker is perfectly placed and given the enclosure, it sounds wonderful and surprisingly clean.
The setup I chose includes the built-in Z-match tuner. I put my own battery in it and that seems to be doing well. I also chose the original thicker version. I love that form factor – a totally aesthetics-driven decision. I did acquire a camera bag for it because I worry about the switches if it’s loose in my backback. $20 worth of padding is pretty good insurance.
For this particular activation, I didn’t need to use the tuner since I had my EFHW antenna that’s resonant on 40/20/10 and I stuck to 20m the whole time. I will toss up the random wire soon enough and see how well the tuner performs. There are high expectations for it as it’s a simple and elegant approach that falls into the Tried and True bucket. Also, having the tuner knobs on the back of the unit is neat. No, I can’t explain why. It just is.
The transceiver maxes out at 5 watts and I ran it at about 3 or 4 while I was on the air. The performance was stunning as demonstrated by the QSO Map. Oh, I didn’t mention it above, but this rig only does CW and has five bands: 80-75, 40, 30, 20, and 17 meters. I’ll be blunt: using this rig would be incentive enough for me to learn CW from scratch. It’s THAT cool. And if you’re trying not to acquire a new rig, definitely avoid talking with Scott VE3QBZ because that operator can sell. I suppose I should thank him!
With the antenna plugged in, the radio showed a near 1:1 match on 20m just like my trusty IC-705 does. I spotted myself on POTA.app and started calling CQ. The band was hopping, so I was confident things were going to go fairly well. Sure enough, I heard back from a station in MA about two minutes after I started calling. That was followed quickly by a station in TX and then, shock of shocks, a station from Puerto Rico! I copied “PR” as the QTH, but it didn’t occur to me until later that I hadn’t mis-copied “OR” or “AR”. Nope. Puerto Rico on 3-ish watts from Ohio. Wow!
There were 15 contacts in a 30 minute period. Sadly, that was all the time I had to be on the air. The sun was dropping quickly, as it does this time of year, and I got the text that told me dinner was going to be moving along soon enough. Packing it in took no time at all. I did take a minute to enjoy the sun over the water and snap a picture or two. A beautiful day for sure!
When I got the log dumped into the QSO Map I was honestly stunned by the spread of contacts. Here’s what it looks like:
From east to west to south I was having a great day. The rig combined with the EFHW performed really well. I was also, again, pretty pleased with my CW work. My copying is improving noticeably. I even navigated a pileup which my buddy Joe KC1SRI recorded and shared with me on Mastodon! I almost sound like I know what I’m doing (at 12-14 wpm). Almost.
As for the TR-45L, well, I’m smitten. Sure, I’ve only got one activation on it, but using it is So Much Fun. I’ve overused that word, so maybe it’s delightful? Is it going to replace my IC-705? No. Let’s not be crazy. They aren’t the same thing at all – and they aren’t trying to be. There’s not a great analogy for how I would compare them, but I’d say that the IC-705 is like a well-kitted out Jeep Wrangler with a lift, a winch, and gnarly tires that can go ANYWHERE. While the TR-45L is a gorgeous vintage Cadillac with white walls that somehow takes us back to a time when we looked at things through an entirely different lens. It still drives on the same roads (and probably gets the same gas mileage) but it’s an entirely different experience. It’s incredibly enjoyable and a view into a time when interfaces to our equipment were more physical and existed in a different space aesthetically. It is a Sunday Driver of a radio.
73!
