I managed to sneak in a Parks on the Air (POTA) activation during a recent Cub Scout camping trip at Falls Lake, K-3841. As part of setting up camp, I threw up a SOTABeams Midi Bandspringer in a tree behind the tent, snaking both aerial and ground wire back in via the rear tent door for later use. After a long day of activities and eating, we settled down in the tent around 9:30pm and the youngest was out by 10pm. Sensing that opportunity was near, I waited a few minutes to ensure he was out-out, then starting wiring together the station. This was the first trip out for my new BioEnno 15Ah battery. After spending a few minutes tuning using my EMTech ZM-2, I checked my work with an analyzer and found that I had a 1.22 SWR on 7.070. Good enough.

I started calling CQ and didn’t get any responses for 5-10 minutes. By this time it was close to 11pm. Fortunately I had cell service at the campsite, and so I checked http://pota.app. Nothing there. (It turns out, I wasn’t including the park identifier in my CQ calls. If I had, I likely would have shown up on the POTA spots page.) Next I checked the Reverse Beacon Network where I could see myself spotted. Finally, I knew my signal could be heard beyond the the sidetone in my ear buds. Sleep would have been easy, but I felt I needed to give the activation an honest try, so I self-spotted http://pota.app and started calling CQ again.

I logged my first QSO a few minutes later (thanks K5LE)! The QSOs started to trickle in, one every 4-5 minutes. I wound up logging 12 POTA contacts on 40m in about an hour using 5W with my Yaesu FT-817ND.

This was my first successful park activation, and I’m glad to have it behind me. The battery did well (as expected), but I noted a few things that could be improved:

  • I recently added a SOTABeams LaserBeam filter to my FT-817ND. When the filter is enabled, I get a weird sound when the transmitter unkeys. It starts to get annoying after 30 minutes.
  • The antenna could be better. I aim to build a resonant antenna QRP antenna some time soon. An end-fed half wave or linked dipole are the leading candidates.