Activating two parks, one day (US-3168 & US-3169)

One of my goals is to activate more different parks. I’ve been eyeing the cluster of parks on Whidbey Island for some time, contemplating a two day POTA excursion to activate all of them. Looking at those parks brought the two parks on Camano Island into my field of attention - Cama Beach State Park (US-3168) and Camano Island State Park (US-3169)

The parks are about a 5 minute drive apart from one another, and the drive to/from the pair of parks is about an hour and 40 minutes from my home.

So, with a day of decent (e.g. not raining hard) weather forecast, I planned to head off early, activate both parks, and return home, all in one day.

Some scoping out of the parks using aerial photos from Apple Maps made me suspect that it would be a fair bit of schlepping from a reasonable parking spot to a picnic table at Cama Beach, so I figured I’d just arrive planning on doing the activation either from the car, or set up a table (and perhaps the Kelty Sideroad shelter) and work from that. In the end, I just worked swiftly from the car.

Given the probability of doing at least one activation from the car, I seized the opportunity to bring along the IC-7300 so I could see how 50 watts SSB felt compared to the 20W on the Xiegu G90.

Cama Beach State Park (US-3168)

This park appears to be a former resort turned into a state park. As I suspected, road closures and the park layout made it a fair schlep from parking to a nice area to activate, so I fell back to my plan of activating from the car.

It took me about 2 minutes to plop the magmount on the roof, thread the coax through the popped sunroof, put the whip on the roof, and fire up the radio.

The first problem was that the noise level was S5-S7 on 20m. A brief check on other bands, particularly 17m, revealed they were nearly as bad, and given that most hunters are on 20m I decided to brave the awful noise floor and just proceed on 20m.

It probably would have made sense for me to move from that parking spot to another distant one and see if that made things better or worse.

Hot tip: high noise floor makes things less fun.

Proceeding on 20M at 50W SSB, I found what seemed to be a clear frequency and spotted myself, then started calling CQ at just about 1815Z/11:15AM local. Calls came at a fairly steady pace and in about 20 minutes I had 11 contacts from AZ, VA, AK, OR, Alberta, MO, MT, TX, CA.

At that point I decided to QSY to 17m, where in two minutes I caught two stations from CA, and then 8 more minutes of calling with no response.

Figuring I’d run 17M dry, I QSY’ed to 15M, which was more productive, netting me WI, IN, PA, NY, AK (same caller as on 20m, my friend Mike AL7KC), and NC. And then again, another dry spell.

At that point, I decided that I was tired of the high noise floor, and I’d proceed to the next park, activate there, and if things were worse there, I’d come back and try a different parking area.

Note that the lookup location for VE6TAB is depicted in Ontario, but she was actually in Calgary, AB.

I was very interested to see the difference in propagation at this time of day between 20M, 17M, and 15M. Not too much difference between 20m and 17m, but 15m was definitely landing my signal all the way on the east coast, and 20m and 17m were not. This seems like a useful observation.

Camano Island State Park (US-3169)

Five minutes driving brought me to the second park. Camano Island SP is spread along the shoreline, and the first parking area you come to was the site of my abortive PSK31 field operation a couple of years ago (aborted due to a failed antenna magmount). Armed with a map of the park, I ventured further in and came to a really nice shoreline area, with bathrooms, a kitchen building you could reserve if you wanted to host a group, said kitchen surrounded by half a dozen picnic tables, and a lengthy set of parking areas. I hit the bathroom, and then decided to set up to work from the car in the parking area closest to the kitchen building.

Given that the radio and desk were already arranged in the car, it took me only a minute or two to be QRV on 20m, running SSB at 50W. To my delight, the noise floor was wonderfully low.

In fact, the noise floor was so low, I could hear stations throughout the General Class SSB portion of the 20m band, so I struggled to find an open frequency to set up shop. In the end I settled on a frequency that was uncomfortably close to two pretty loud stations, not ideal but you accept what you must. Clearly propagation was pretty good, and at 1935Z I had spotted myself and was calling CQ.

The first hunter was Mike AL7KC, who was confused about whether he had copied the wrong park number for our two previous QSOs, or I had actually moved to a different park - the two parks are US-3168 and US-3169. At this point it’s actually uncommon for me to do an activation and NOT hear from Mike, which is very nice.

After closing with Mike, the next 20 minutes netted me a total of 20 QSOs, covering AK, WA, OR, CA, UT, NV, AZ, CO. 20m was hopping but not very long reach.

Moving to 17m, roughly 15 minutes of calling netted me hunters from NV, PA, UT, and CA. Once again, about the same signal footprint as 20m, with fewer hunters and a lot less hubbub on the band.

At about 2020Z I moved to 15m, and the fun began. 10 minutes of calling landed hunters from CA, FL, OK, IL, SC, and Japan.

After taking a little stretch break I QSYed once again, to 10m, where 5 minutes of calling landed AZ, AK (2x) and NY.

At this point I had 35 SSB QSOs and I was running out of time if Ι wanted to do any CW, so I packed up the SSB station and set about setting up on the picnic table proximate to where I had parked the car.

CW

For CW I really like using the KX2 despite it running only 10W, as the controls are very similar to the KX3 and familiar from my using the KX3 heavily at home.

I briefly considered deploying the Chelegance MC-750, but I’ve been wanting to try a ‘random wire’ non-resonant antenna and the space between the parked car and the picnic table seemed pretty ideal.

It took me some faffing about to get the drive on mount properly set under a rear tire of the car, and then unwind the 41’ radiating element and raise it up, hook up the matching unit, spread the counterpoise, and run the coax to the radio. Clearly a little practice there will smooth that out and speed it up. I’m guessing with a little practice putting up the mast and antenna will be easily under 5 minutes - a great deal of it is properly judging the distance between things.

In any case, at last I was all set up, KX2 and Begali Traveler set to go.

Finding a clear spot at 14065.5, five minutes of calling CQ netted me hunters from BC and TN, and then… silence.

Remembering the lesson on band from running SSB earlier, I moved to 15m, where very quickly I got DE, TX, CA, ME, TN, and WA.

I then moved to 10m, where I found 28.055 clear and rapidly reeled in JA1VVH in Japan before some sort of QRM drove me to move to 28.055, where I got SD, NY, Chile, AK (Mike, again), WA, VA, AZ, and IA.

When 10m is working, man, it really works. Every one of those 9 CW contacts on 10m was 599 to me, and my meager 10W got me signal reports ranging from 539 to 599.

Any activation where you bag Japan, Alaska, and Chile in 22 minutes of operating, my personal Fun-O-Meter is pegged.

It is pretty easy to fall in love with QRP CW when conditions are good.

After that brilliant run on 10m I realized I was going to arrive home pretty late, so I quickly packed it all up, and started the 1:40 drive home.

Box Score

Total QSOs: 19 + 52 = 71
Park to Park: 2 + 3 = 5
Total CW QSOs: 17
Time spent operating: 0:38 + 2:45 = 3:23 hours
Solo CW bonus points: 17 + 2 DX specials
Pleasant weather bonus: .5
Favorite Picnic Table points: 2 for a new fave in a new park

Things lost: 0
Things broken: 0
Equipment frustration time: 0 minutes
Vital gear not included in loadout: 0

Final Fun-O-Meter^(tm) reading: (9+11)/2 = 10