Another fun activation of US-3216 (Lake Sammamish State Park)

Despite the dour outlook of various propagation prediction tools and reports of cruddy band conditions I was eager to get back to doing activations after my long hiatus while we traveled in Egypt and Jordan. So with some angst about how things would go I loaded up the G90 kit and the KX2 kit into the car, and headed to Lake Sammamish State Park. The weather forecast was for solid overcast but as I drove to the park the sun came out and things felt a little more promising. I arrived at the park about 1:20pm, and found the park pretty empty.

Setup

My meager POTA experience gives me a slight preference for shady activation spots, but the lower temps, a slight breeze, and my personal temp preference having been influenced to higher temps by four weeks in Egypt and Jordan (temps above 100F) had me choosing a picnic table not far from my Usual Spot(tm), but in the intermittent sun.

The Chelegance MC-750 went up in just a few minutes, a quick check with the RigExpert Stick 500 showed a 1.07 SWR on 20m, and in short order I was QRV on the G90 set for 20W.

Given the gloomy news from the usual propagation sources (QRZ, solarham.com) I was surprised when dialing around the 20m band I was hearing stations from all over.

SSB

I found a clear frequency, called QRL a few times, and then spotted myself on pota.app and commenced calling CQ. It took perhaps five minutes of calling CQ before I started getting calls, but then the calls rolled in at a nice comfortable unhurried pace and in just over a quarter of an hour, I had ten contacts to validate the activation. Those first ten calls were from AZ, AB, ID, WA, OR, CA, and CO. I was pleased that I was getting out that well.

I continued to work 20m until things seemed to slow down some (21 contacts over about 40 minutes) and then thought I’d give other bands a try.

I adjusted the antenna for 15m SSB, found a clear frequency, and started calling. Things were slow at first but then picked up, and 20 minutes I’d picked up another 10 contacts, from NM, CT, TN, MI, CA, NY. Clearly 15m had a different signal footprint from 20m, which sort of confirmed what I had figured out using VOACAP and playing with propagation forecasts. Anyway I was very pleased with this and did a little mental happy dance, and then moved to 17m to see how that went.

On 17m, I quickly picked up 3 contacts, two from CA and one from OK, and then things dried up.

CW

At that point, with 34 contacts in the log, I decided to see how badly I would fare doing CW, so I put away the G90, broke out the KX2 and Begali Adventure, set it all up for 20m, and started calling CQ.

To my surprise I was not having too much trouble with decoding callsigns (for me, this means occasionally getting a callsign without sending ‘?’, and getting the rest with only one request for a repeat)

All of the stations calling were 599 to me, except one 339 station that I suspect was operating QRP in California. The signal reports I was getting back were about half good reports and half 339, with one 229 thrown in there to make me feel grateful that N6RUN was so patient as to make contact when they could hardly hear me.

In the end after 9 contacts, I was out of time and had added CW contacts from CA (5 contacts!), NJ, CO, UT, and AR(599!)

I was very pleased with all this.

Box Score

Total QSOs: 43
Park to Park: 5
Total CW QSOs: 9
Time spent operating: ~2 hours
Solo CW bonus points: 15
Pleasant weather bonus: 25
Favorite Picnic Table points: 10

Things lost: 0
Things broken: 0
Vital gear not included in loadout: 0

Final Fun-O-Metertm reading: 9.0