When I looked at the weather going up to the weekend, I thought that the weather would be cold with a touch of snow, perhaps, and that would drive people out of the park. Which park? Any park. Tinker’s Creek State Park [K-1997] looked like a great place to try. I’d never been there before,…
I took Friday off and managed to get out to Cuyahoga Valley National Park (K-0020) for a bit with my wife and her dog. I decided to leave The Mighty Nacho at home as the weather was questionable at best. For some reason Ohio can’t let go of the snow this year. While my wife…
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…
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 decided to jump in on the ARRL RTTY Roundup this year. My original plan was to get FLDIGI working and/or a combination of logging software with 2tone embedded, but I quickly ran out of time. I’m still very new to RTTY and while I’ve done a good amount of listening, I haven’t made a…
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…
Monday, July 05 was a holiday for me, so it made sense to head out into the field for a little radio fun. The IC-705 and assorted gear were already in their pack and ready to go. The destination for the day was to be the Virginia Kendall section of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park….
Each summer, my family tries to book a cabin in the middle of nowhere so we can go hiking, paddling, and fishing. In recent years, our favorite spot in central Pennsylvania was sold and we started trying other places. With our move, we decided to try out something new entirely. We headed for a cabin…
On Memorial Day, my dad (AC8NT) and I headed out to Hampton Hills Metropark to see if we could get some contacts on a gorgeous summer day. The spot we found at The Top O’ The World was perfect. There were two benches situated beside a very large tree that was perfect for the end-fed…