Parks On The Air Fort Worden

Today we made our way out to Fort Worden State Park to do another POTA activation.  Being a Saturday it was pretty busy.  I found the most out of the way spot that I could and set up the Sota Beams Tactical Mini, Band Hopper. and Yaesu FT-891.  I was hoping to make some voice contacts but the people visiting the park had other plans.


About 15 contacts in and a minivan pulls in next to me, one of their kids jumps right out, grabs a stick and starts hitting my antenna.  Asking the dad to not let them do that his response was “you’re in a state park…”. Yup guess that means all rules are off and I can beat your stuff with a stick.  Luckily the kids mom had an ounce of sense and explained to the boy why he should respect other people’s property.  The boy was able to apologize which I appreciated mom actually being a parent.

Then the out of the way parking lot that I had found started to fill up.  No longer in a secluded spot and irritated, I decided to pack it up and worry about making voice contacts some other time.  So we went off and explored the fort.  Pretty cool that they let you in and around the building.  I'd imagine it wont be long before someone ruins that for everyone.  But for now it's a cool place to check out.

But… park activated with FT8, my wife and I had a good time exploring, and the dog got enough walking in that he eventually gave up and wanted back in his pack.  Probably my last park for the weekend.  I want to do some research on a good antenna for HF use that has a much smaller footprint and I can run it incognito.  😎

73s ~K7WJV

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hammo Can

Image
Well, I decided to jump on the craze and create a Hammo Can.  The idea was to put a 2m/70cm radio, a LifePo4 battery, external speaker, microphone, and antenna connector in an ammo can.  Hopefully with enough room left for me to put a small chunk of coax and an easy to deploy J-pole antenna in there.   I surfed around the interwebs and found all kind of examples, some people went over the top with theirs and obviously invested upwards of $1000.  My plan was to keep dollar amounts as low as possible and still end up with a cool product. Off to Harbor Freight I went.  They had a couple different flavors of ammo cans…. I grabbed a couple of each of the plastic ones.   Built the original one in the smaller of the two, but later decided I wanted a little bit more room and moved the entire setup over to the larger can.   Now that I had the cans and an idea of the space I had to deal with I started hunting for a radio.  I landed on the  Anytone AT-7...
Read more

Parks On The Air Kanasket-Palmer and Federation Forest

Image
Today I decided to try and activate two parks.  I loaded up the FT-891, Mini Tactical Mast, Bandhopper 2, filled the cooler and headed to the hills.  First stop was Kanasket-Palmer State Park, I got there just after opening and there was only one other car in the lot.  I got everything set up, and started running FT8.  From the time I started setting up until I had the park activated and was packing the truck was roughly an hour and forty minutes.  From there I headed to Nolte state park, unfortunately they had a triathlon that was going to take place so I decided to about the hassle.  I set the GPS to Federation Forest and made my way through Enumclaw. Federation Forest State Park is small, not much room at each parking spot to set up.  But I managed.  I bungee corded the mast to the tailgate of the truck and ran my radials to a couple nearby downed trees.  With the truck smack dab under the antenna my SWR was a little high at roughly 1.6:1....
Read more

Assembling a Fox for Fox Hunting

Image
  Last week I was having a conversation with a friend about what there is to do in ham radio.  One of the things that I always thought looked fun was fox hunting (otherwise known as radio direction finding). Since I tend to be a little spontaneous, I hopped onto the Byonics web site and made some orders. First into the cart was the PicCon Foxhunt Controller, I threw in the cables for programming and power, and an antenna too.  Then I got to thinking how it would be fun to have a micro size fox so once you find the higher power one you have to get out on foot and really work to locate the other.  So back I went and placed another order for a MicroFox.  Cool unit, all self contained, so not much to say about the MicroFox yet.  Will have to break that one in hunting. Finally everything showed up!  I had a few of the needed items already, I had a dusty 6ah LifePo4 battery sitting around, like many people I have way too many Baofeng radios, and I also had ...
Read more