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