Another OSPOTA is in the books. As with the other OSPOTA events I’ve participated in over the years, I went down to Salt Fork State Park US-1989 with my wife and we spent a great weekend enjoying the outdoors and playing a little radio.
OK. The outdoors weren’t that great this year. There was high humidity, temps in the 80s, and no breeze at all. Inside the camper was like a weird sauna. Not at all typical fare for OSPOTA in my short career. So while I was sweating away in the camper, my wife and the Radio Rottie were out hiking in a stifling forest beset with mosquitoes. Not fantastic. But better than it could be!
The Great Outdoors
We’ve been camping light lately since it’s been the two of us (plus dog) for a couple of trips. We’re getting a lot better at that and that’s probably a good sign. If this had been a regular camping trip and not OSPOTA, my radio gear would have been entirely different. That wasn’t the case. This was OSPOTA. So everything that needed to come along came along.
As with previous years, I brought the IC-705 along as the rig of choice. Why? Because it’s awesome and it’s my little buddy in the field. I don’t have anything else that can touch it. Paired with the Hardrock-50, it’s a really amazing setup. Given that we had shore power, the powersupply and the Hardrock came along for the ride. This is the rare occasion where I go above 5 watts. I even saw the meter on the Hardrock indicate 49 watts PEP! That is CRAZY power! Definitely don’t recommend licking the antenna while I’m sending with that. Speaking of the antenna, I put up the Chameleon with the extension. It just works really well when I’m hopping from band to band and I built the Hardrock with an ATU module so everything matches nicely. It performed pretty darned well, in my opinion.
This picture was taken while I was giving the station a shakedown. I grabbed 18 or so contacts on FT8 before things got started just to make sure I was being heard and that the station was in good order. Data QSOs are not permitted for OSPOTA so those contacts went into the log for my POTA activation which occurred at the same time.
The Rules
I like OSPOTA because it respects my time. It’s 8 hours (1400 to 2200 UTC). SSB and CW only. 80m, 40m, 20m, 15m, and 10m. There are multipliers if you get other Ohio State Parks. Otherwise, it’s all about grabbing some QSOs. Spotting is allowed and encouraged to get the word out. After all, this is a contest that’s about promoting Ohio’s state parks and has been since 2008. That pre-dates a lot of park stuff and makes it a point of pride for my local club, PCARS, who sponsors the event. The rules are simple. The contest is the right length for guys like me who don’t do a lot of contesting, and you can double dip on a POTA activation if you want. Sounds like a perfect Saturday in the park.
New Things?
If you were looking carefully in the station picture above, you’d see a little blue puck. What is that?
I’ve been running a set of Putikeeg paddles as my goto for POTA for a while now. I find that they are really rugged and take my abuse without complaint. Something that has bothered me about the set I have is the fact that everything about them is exposed. Not great for an environment where wind, rain, dust, dirt, sand, and snow might be flying around. I follow K4SWL’s blog qrper.com pretty closely as Thomas puts out great videos that I find very, very relaxing and informative. He put out a question for what people use for their field keys/paddles in the weather. I didn’t find a link to what I bought, but it put me on the trail and I picked up a set. The price is right and they work really well!
Now. Seriously? I have a Begali Traveller. It is probably the most amazing mechanical object in my home. I adore it. But I took it to the park with me for a long time and had an episode where I thought I’d lost it. Never again. I will take it with me on special occasions, but for regular use in POTA? No thanks. It’ll stay on the desk in the shack.
All of that to say that the Putikeeg paddles are NOT a Begali. These are very different paddles with very different use cases and risk profiles. If I lost the Putikeeg? I’d replace it for sure. I’d be frustrated, but I wouldn’t lose my mind like I would if I lost the Begali. And these paddles? They’re good! They perform! They take my slapping around, have great magnets in the base, and this set encloses all of the bits you don’t want wet or dirty. Total win!
Was it a great idea to use that instead of something I knew would work on a contest? No. But it was fun!
Speaking Of Fun…
The other thing I did this time around was pull together a piece of software to do my logging.
Buckle up. This is going to get weird.
I wrote KC8JCLogger because I wanted to play with a Python application and turn a silly utility into a piece of working software. I didn’t really want to make a logger, but that’s how it ended up. This year, I found myself thinking about adding an OSPOTA feature to it. I started to poke at it and then immediately put it into a new application. I did a lot of copy paste from KC8JCLogger and put together a VERY simple UI for capturing QSOs. Callsign, RST Sent, RST Received, and Exchange. Exchange could be NOT (OH station but not in a park), DX (anywhere else), a State for inside the US (works for POTA compatibility but could also be DX), or an OSPOTA Park Code. Really simple.
All of the QSOs get fed into a data table just like KC8JCLogger. But the cool thing I added was a neat UI to show it was connected to Rigctld for frequency and mode data and an indicator to tell me whether or not that connection was working. Sometimes things happen in the field and it’s good to know if something went sideways.
The software also shows the current station data. Where I am, the class I’m working, and grid square. Looks more official with that stuff in the UI.
The neat part? The really neat part? I had it track the multipliers. Any time I had a QSO with another park, it added the park code to the Multipliers area. It also tracked the contact count per band. At the bottom, total QSOs, Multipliers, Score, and Parks worked all show up. It even tracks the minimums.
Maybe the best feature is that it exports to ADIF and Cabrillo at the same time. So I get my log for submission to the contest and something that I can either dump into KC8JCLogger or POTA.app. I also had the robot check the output against the rules and samples and it seems to be clean.
To say I was without a net on this software is an understatement. I started working on it the day before the contest. I did ask the robot to check a couple of edge cases for me and it found a MAJOR bug that would have blown up on my third QSO with a park. So yay, I guess? But this was the epitome of Alpha software. More of a sketch than a program. I will roll this into KC8JCLogger in some form so that I can make field logging faster.
Might also put out the OSPOTA only thing next time around. Share it for funsies for other people who don’t really like any other logging software.
Other Station Notes
I mentioned that the logger pulls rig data from rigctld. I run wfview as my interface to the IC-705. The laptop and the 705 attach to a TP-Link portable router that can run from a USB battery pack. That router in turn connects to my phone for network. Why? So it can get the time for when I’m doing FT8 mostly. With some changes I’ve made to how KC8JCLogger works, it might come in handy. But it’s about the time. Without the phone in play, the 705 and the laptop talk to each other effectively and wfview provides its own rigctld instance that allows the logger to grab rig details on the fly and keep my QSOs accurate!
How Did It Go?
Well, I didn’t get as many contacts as I would have liked. My SSB contacts on 40m seemed sketchy. Part of this was the fact that I was running a vertical whip. That’s not great, even with the boost of the Hardrock. It got the job done, but when the bands got noisy and I got down in the mud, there was no pulling me out. That did bum me out a little. CW was great! I got plenty of contacts and even picked up one of the parks on CW. Love it when that happens. But 40m got loud earlier than I would have expected and 20m didn’t seem to be wonderful. Again, could be me. It could also be that I was at a State Park Campground with RVs around sporting LED strings that create more noise than light. I should have been handing out chokes like a house at Halloween. Alas, it was not to be. There would be some adversity.
That’s fine. Even though it was hot in the camper and there was noise, I still got to sit and tap out code and make contacts with other park enthusiasts. I got some friends in the log like Joe KC1SRI and plenty of hunters who have been there for me in the past.
What I do love most about OSPOTA is that I don’t feel rushed. Usually, if I’m doing an activation with family around, I feel like I need to hurry up and get it over with so I can get back to being with them. There is some truth to that, but also? We’re all there to relax and unwind. If I do that with headphones and paddles? No harm, no foul. OSPOTA just feels different because we’re there for that and it seems to me that making contacts is the thing.
The QSO Map
Take a look at that map. There’s a weird one in there that I need to dig into since I didn’t notice it until I ran it through qsomap.com and that’s the line going down to The South Pole. Something is wacky in there and I bet it’s on the FT8 side of things. Looks cool though! As one might expect, CW looks great, SSB is really close (mostly 40m), and the FT8 is kinda in there all over. I’m pleased with that to be sure.
Lessons Learned
I like to keep notes on what went well and what didn’t. With OSPOTA and the Hardrock, I always bring along my little USB fan. It is the difference between 130F and 98F on the surface of the Hardrock. I just don’t want to have that heat if I don’t have to and the fan doesn’t create any RF interference or too much noise.
One of the PowerPole connectors from the power supply popped off. I fixed it easily enough but it made me nervous. Need to re-crimp that bad unit and maybe bring the PowerPole tools with me for the next contest. Or work out another way to get it into the power disribution box. Yeah, I can hear the PowerPole critics laughing from here. I’m still not changing. It wasn’t that bad.
I need a bigger pad of scratch paper for grabbing callsigns out of the noise. Sometimes you get characters 1-3 and then 5. Logging software isn’t great for jumping around and I don’t want to waste Rite In The Rain log books when scrap paper would do. Something to consider.
I am going to seriously consider a different kind of antenna for next year. The truth is, a vertical whip is great for footprint and I can’t honestly do much else at a campground, but I’m going to think about it. I’d love to put up a hex beam, but that seems like begging people to stop by and ask if I’m a spy or trying to contact aliens. Still, it’d be sweet!
Final
All in all, it was a great trip and a fantastic OSPOTA for me. It’s a great reminder that while not every contest is for me, this one is.
As a reward for reading this far, I present Bella The Radio Rottie!
Thanks for reading and 73!