With a couple of failed activation attempts behind me, I decided to turn my park trips into experiments. Last week, I tried a different approach to my Jeep mounted MP1. That didn’t really do much for me. So this time out, I was going to ditch the MP1 and head out into a field so…
This was supposed to be a quick trip out to Wingfoot Lake State Park (K-3516). The variables for this operation were narrowed to simply making 10 FT8/FT4 contacts. I will lead with this: yet again, I got 8 contacts. This time, I was out there for about 2 hours working on 20m. The bands were…
Another set of experiments and another list of lessons that were learned through experience. Part of the joy of ham radio is in the challenges that it provides. One can dial in the gear very tightly and still hit vairables like propagation and even the whims of other operators. It’s a wild ride every time…
This year I have several Stupid Arbitrary Goals that center on radio. One of them is a number of portable operations and the other is activating parks. I decided on these SAGs later than I might and thus January was out. So this weekend, The Big Plan was to get outdoors and activate a park….
I’m not a New Years Resolutions kind of a guy, but I do keep a running list of goals that I review every month. It’s a habit I got into years ago, and while it’s rather silly, I do it anyway. So as I was thinking about goals and radio, a neat blog post dropped…
Portable operation has been a lot of fun for me since the IC-705 showed up in my shack. It’s a really great QRP rig and I have had a wonderful time getting out and making contacts. One of the things that I’ve found while messing around at parks or on vacation is that it would…
This past weekend, PCARS went out to the Akron Maker Faire to show off ham radio. We put a SuperAntenna up on the roof of the building and dropped a cable down to the main display area. I set up my portable station. It was simply my IC-705 and the MS Surface Go 2 running…
Saturday mornings have, for the time being, been set up as portable operating times for me. There are several parks in the area – Ohio seems to have an embarrassment of riches in that regard – and getting out into them feels really good. This past Saturday, West Branch State Park was the destination. The…
When the summer was just rolling around, I ordered a SOTABeams Tactical Mini mast for portable operation. It seemed to stall out in Chicago (as a lot of things traveling into the states are) and then was magically in my mailbox one morning. I was pretty excited about it, but things got in the way…
This past Saturday, I took a couple of hours to go and operate from my Jeep in a park parking lot. It was a bit of a last minute expedition, so I didn’t have any real objectives other than to try out something that I’ve wanted to play with for a while. That’s running the…