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…
Another set of experiments and another list of lessons that were learned through experience. Part of the joy of ham radio is in the challenges that it provides. One can dial in the gear very tightly and still hit vairables like propagation and even the whims of other operators. It’s a wild ride every time…
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….
In the course of my life, I have found that in various pursuits, I tend to favor things that have some challenge to them. This was true with my selection of pieces to learn for the guitar when I was in conservatory and it’s true in radio. I’m really enjoying the challenges of working portable…
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…