One Activation, Two days

A week of looking around for another set of parks that would give me an opportunity to do two parks in one day left me at the end of the week having done no activations and with no real plan. It didn’t help that the weather was uniformly lousy all week.

But I was resolved to fit an activation into the week and so with a Friday clear of obligations, I headed off to my reliable standard, Lake Sammamish State Park (US-3216), where I thought I might spend most of the day and explore how propagation varies for various bands at differing times of day.

I’ve noticed that when I arrive early in the morning for an activation, things are pretty slow, so I was aiming for a late morning arrival and then staying right up to 0000UTC. That plan would have me home in plenty of time for dinner.

Setup

I was expecting rain, so I headed for my usual picnic shelter, hoping no one else was using it. The sign said no reservation, no one was using it, and in short order I had my gear set up on the easternmost picnic table, with the Chelegance MC-750 on the tripod on the grass just east of the shelter. This was my first test of the new 25’ ABR armored coax. It’s just the right length!

SSB

Using the Xiegu G90 running 20W, I set up shop on 10m and in ~15 minutes I had ten QSOs in the log.

Figuring I’d just run thru the bands, at that point I moved to 12m, where another ~15 minutes got me a mere 2 QSOs. 12m appears to be not very popular with SSB hunters.

15m netted me four QSOs in about 10 minutes. 17m also netted four QSOs in about 5 minutes before running dry 20m netted 14 QSOs in about half an hour, at that point, roughly two hours into the activation, I had totaled 33 QSOs on SSB, and my time for the activation was roughly half over, so at that point I packed away the G90 and set up the KX2 and key.

CW

I felt like my plan to roll through the bands was fairly successful on SSB, so my plan was to do the same thing on CW.

10m: 8 QSOs in about 16 minutes
12m: 6 QSOs in about 10 minutes
15m: 10 QSOs in about 15 minutes
17m: 5 QSOs in about 15 minutes
20m: 16 QSOs in about 22 minutes

Annoyingly, that last 20m CW QSO (which was with LU4HK) landed in a new UTC day by 24 seconds, so when I uploaded the log, I had one valid activation, and one activation with just one QSO!

Day Two

Annoyed by the ‘failed activation’ I headed back to the park the following morning (the UTC day doesn’t roll over until 4pm PST). I was hoping to make this a very short activation!

Given the early hour I arrived, I started on 15m, where I racked up 10 SSB contacts in 20 minutes, and, with the activation in the bag, rounded that out with 4 CW contacts in 4 minutes before I packed it all up and headed home.

Box Score

Total QSOs: 78 + 14
Park to Park: 5+4
Total CW QSOs: 45 + 4
Time spent operating: ~4.5 hours
Solo CW bonus points: 49
Pleasant weather bonus: -2
Favorite Picnic Table points: 1

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

Final Fun-O-Meter^(tm) reading: 11.0