Freeze Your Acorns Off
Each year, my local club hosts a QRP event at Fred Fuller Park in Kent, Ohio. It was the first event the club ever held and they’ve kept that tradition alive. Part of it is wearing Hawaiian shirts to thumb our collective noses at Mother Nature during an outdoor operating event that is usually held in February in less than comfortable conditions. There is also a competition of sorts for the best shared dish. And points for things like having a black squirrel (the club mascot) at your operating position.
For me, it’s less about the competition itself and more about sitting outside in miserable weather playing radio with my dad. We always team up and while we don’t win, we have a lot of fun.
As with last year, we primarily ran FT8. Digital and CW have a 5 watt max with a 10 watt allowance for Phone. I didn’t feel like talking and I know that because we’re not at a POTA entity, grabbing contacts is never easy. FT4/FT8 is always a good choice.
We made about 31-ish contacts. Plenty of different states and we got a province in there and Cuba as well. Not too bad. We didn’t plan on winning and left a couple of hours early because of things and stuff. It was a lot of fun. Just shooting the stuff with other club members and whatnot. Very relaxed. Not nearly as cold as last year, but still rainy and miserable so the spirit of the event was in tact.
A Regular Activation
The Sunday after FYAO it was a bit warmer. In fact, when I got to West Branch SP – K-1999 I noticed that there were more cars there than I’ve seen in a quite a while. Certainly more than I’ve seen to date this year. There were plenty of disc golfers and I counted 5 boats in my time there. The temperatures were in the lower 50s so it was no surprise that there were people on the water. During my time at the park, it was overcast, but the sun came out later in the day.
I put up the AX1 and started on 40-meters. I did pretty well. I did move over to 20-meters and it wasn’t that bad. There was a big SSB contest going on so the CW segments of the bands weren’t too bad.
Once again, I got my buddy out in Oregon (WA7RAR) with a faint signal, but readable. And I did get surprise. Way, way down in the noise there was a faint signal. I tuned a little bit and cranked it up on the IC-705. There it was. I1EEW. Very slowly. Three times in a row with a pause. I got back to them and sure enough, we had a contact. Italy! Imagine that! On 5 watts from NE Ohio! I do love those little surprises that pop up now and again. It keeps it all very, very interesting.
QSO Map
I once again have proof that the AX1 is the worst dummy load I own having leaked it’s RF as far as Oregon, Florida, Texas, and Italy. Here’s what it looked like.
Final
I’m inching my way toward my kilo at West Branch. I need to close it out before cycling weather is here in earnest and I start only activating parks that I can get to on a bike. I certainly could get to West Branch on a bike, but there are stretches of highway that are just too dangerous for bikes based on my experience. It’s OK. I have several parks that I can cycle to regularly and there will be plenty of opportunities for that this spring and summer.
Thanks for reading and 72!
