It’s Here.
I’m going to call it: spring has finally hit in NE Ohio. What does that mean? Honestly, it means being outside at the parks and not having my fingers freeze as I work CW or get my stuff set up. It also brings along with it some surprise rain showers. The truth still holds that there is no bad weather, just insufficient gear.
What it also means, however is that some of my operating procedures have to shift a bit. During the winter, when I’ve been out at the largely uninhabited parks, I’ve been using my EFHW a fair bit. In the months when there are more people around and there are more leaves in trees, I skew toward my collection of verticals. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how I will approach this season, but in the course of one week, the trees at Cuyahog Valley National Park – US-0020 have started to fill in and with that comes incresed difficulty with lines in trees. At least for those like me who are not particularly accurate with our throws.
More about this later, but I’m thinking a lot about what it means to work QRP and how critical our choices are when it comes to antennas.
Getting Outside
It wasn’t much of a sell to get my wife to head out to the park on Saturday. We’d thought about biking out there, but the puppy really needed a nice, long walk to wear her out, so we decided we’d drive out there and she could take a hike while I set up and made some contacts. Not a bad plan!
This time around, I had my IC-705 and AX1. This is a pretty secure combo. I was really hoping that they would perform for me on this outing given the rough conditions the previous weekend.
Well…
Not In The Cards
The bands were hot garbage. 20-meters was crashing and fading. 40-meters was almost useless. When I can’t hear anything on the IC-705, I start to think that either my antenna is not plugged in or that the ionosphere has fled the scene. It was really rough. I struggled to get my 10 contacts in about 90 minutes. In the middle of all of this, we even got a little sprinkling. This is why I always have a tarp!
QSO Map
It wasn’t a great day, but I got there. 2 park to parks were in the collection and this is what it looked like:
Final
When the bands are like this, it’s tempting to scrutinize everything. Should I have tossed an antenna in a tree? Should I have taken along other options? Should I do some deep analysis during some backyard portable?
This is where things like Mastodon shine. It was easy to get feedback from other hams who could confirm for me that it wasn’t just me and my puny 5 watts. It was everyone.
As I always say, a day outside with the radio in any conditions is better than not getting outside.
Thanks for reading and 72!
