Field Operating
Parks on the Air is the gateway drug to amateur radio field operating. Oh, I know, the traditional thought is that Field Day is the thing that gets hams out into the field and out of their shack in the basement/garage/spare bedroom.
That’s bullshit. Right now, Parks on the Air (aka POTA) is where field operating is at. POTA is bigger than all the other field operation programs, combined. SOTA, IOTA, LOTA - roll them all together, and they aren’t a tickle compared to POTA. POTA is driving a huge renaissance in field/portable operating in the ham radio world.
No, that’s not quite right. It’s not a renaissance. There was never a program that drove so much portable/field operating.
And I have fallen in love with it. I started doing POTA activations in earnest just about a year ago. Since then, roughly one activation a week. 1500 QSOs, 32 different parks. Even the parks I’ve activated repeatedly, I’ve changed the spot I activate from countless times, actively avoiding falling into a ‘favorite spot’ rut.
Four different radios. Different power sources, different antennas. I’ve worked from inside the car, adjacent to the car, out on a picnic table, and sitting in a sketchy little chair in the woods. CW, digital modes, SSB. Quite a lot of it has been a) well outside my comfort zone, and b) well inside my fun zone.
It has been one whirlwind nonstop learning experience.
So I want to try to capture some what I’ve learned, and distill it down into what might pass for field/portable operating wisdom. It’s not that I claim to be - or even want to be regarded as - an expert. I am far, far from expert. What I have is not expertise. We have all of us, over the past half decade, learned at great expense that we ought to be very wary of anyone who claims to be expert.
But what I have is experience. Experience is what you get when you just go out there and give things a whirl. Things go wrong, and either that turns into a failure, or else you figure out how to adapt. Either way, you learned something useful.
We tend to think of mistakes as a bad thing. That’s a result of a short term view. I think mistakes are how we progress. Mistakes might be cheap, they might be expensive. No matter what, they offer an opportunity to learn and to get better.
I am a huge fan of learning from mistakes. My preference is to learn from other people’s mistakes, but when I make a mistake, I’m not above learning from that, too. But it occurs to me that perhaps other people would like to learn from my mistakes, and that by sharing them, I might advance the cause of amateur radio just a smidgen.
What I have learned
The 4 essentials for field operating are:
- a transmitter and receiver. A transceiver works and is the usual arrangement.
- an antenna system - that’s an antenna, an optional (but hard to avoid) feed line, and an optional common mode choke.
- an input method - key, mike, computer, etc. This will largely be determined by (or will determine) what mode you want to operate in (e.g. cw, SSB voice, FM voice, FT8, PSK31, etc.)
- a power source
There are a bunch of conveniences that aren’t essentials - for instance, a way to log your contacts, a comfortable chair, a work surface, and so on. Much of effective field operating is enabled by or depends upon these ‘conveniences’, so perhaps some of them blur the line between conveniences and essentials. That’s ok, I’ll sort that out as I go along.
Anyway, my plan is to put together blog posts covering each of those 4 essential categories, and some posts covering various conveniences as well, and then gather links to those posts above.
