Optimizing POTA

I’m an inveterate optimizer. I’m not suggesting that I optimize for what other people expect - in fact, often the opposite. But it’s a peculiar habit of mine to do something, and afterwards take a moment or two to ponder how I could make whatever it was better. If it’s some drudgery task, perhaps I want to get it done more quickly, or with a better result. If it’s some recreational activity I’m often pondering how I might make it more pleasant. Anyway, when it comes to POTA, I’m not interested in optimizing for maximum QSOs, or chasing DX, or anything like that. Mostly what I want to optimize for is maximum fun.

And, to that end, I’ve been thinking about what factors affect how much fun I have when doing a POTA activation.

Which operating modes are the most fun

For me, not all modes are created equal. Some are definitely more fun than others.

Digital modes

I know many hams find FT8 and FT4 incredibly exciting, because it lets them work DX even with very modest stations, and each QSO is quite brief, so you can make a lot of contacts with minimal time investment.

But I am not one of those hams. I find FT8 and FT4 to be peculiarly not much fun.

It’s not a matter of disliking digital HF modes. I really like PSK31, PSK64, and all the related modes - they strike a pleasant balance between being workable even with weak signals and being acceptably fast enough to be conversational. Sure, it’s possible to work PSK31 and keep it very brief and terse. But it also works nicely for ragchews.

Anyway, I’ve got thousands of PSK QSOs in my log, and I’d be perfectly happy working PSK for a park activation. The problem is that few hunters will work PSK. But perhaps it’s possible to throw PSK in to the mix at activations and help to grow the population of hunters who will give PSK a whirl.

So one thing to do is to make sure I have fldigi on my laptop, ready to run and configured for the radios I use, so that I can take a crack at doing PSK31 or PSK64 during activations, and write a set of macros just for POTA activations. And also enlisting the aid of my friends in the PODXS070 club to be watching for me when I am planning on doing this.

Single Sideband

There’s a spectrum of activators that runs from doing what I’ll call ‘contest style’ QSOs (very terse, very impersonal, maximum speed) through to ragchew style operating (each contact might be an extended conversation).

I fall well toward the ragchew end of that spectrum, but I also recognize that when activators take quite a lot of time with each hunter, that diminishes the fun for hunters, who might have to wait quite a long time to get their turn.

I suspect that maximum fun is had not at the extremes, but somewhere in the middle, where QSOs are conversational and not rushed, but also don’t just drone on and on, and at the end of the day you have enough QSOs that you easily clear the 10 you need to ‘validate’ the activation and you’re content with the number of QSOs.

If calls are coming in pretty slowly I tend to try to avoid my tendency to rush. Even when there’s a bit of a queue of callers and something of a pileup, I do try to not rush - it just feels like rushing reduces the fun.

But the bottom line is that, despite my dislike of SSB a year ago, I’m finding that activating SSB is a lot of fun simply because it offers so much opportunity for casual interaction between the two parties in each QSO. So I suspect that going forward, at least some of my activations will include a fair bit of SSB operating.

CW

CW operating has a peculiar advantage over other modes for me right now, and the advantage is that I’m not very good at it but I’m trying to get better.

So if I’m activating using CW, it means that capturing that incoming callsign is going to involve me working just a little bit beyond my competence. Even sending is a bit of a challenge for me, as I’m not really very comfortable with the paddles and so sending while making a decision about what signal report to send, logging, and all the rest is likewise a challenge that is right at the limit of what I can do.

And, it turns out, that means that CW is a flow experience for me.

Curiously, one advantage I’m exploiting is that I’m doing CW on the KX2, which is a great radio but limited in power. I’m very unlikely to get significant pileups running 5-10W here in the PNW.

Operating Position

I’ve done enough activations working from inside my car, and enough working from a picnic table, that I know pretty surely that working from inside the car is not my preference.

Picnic tables are nice to work from - plenty of space to spread gear out, no gear on the ground where it will try to get lost and likely succeed, no sitting on the cold ground, often situated with a nice view.

The problem I see when I look forward to activations in the next 5 months is rain.

Working at a picnic table in the rain seems like a not fun thing.

So far two alternatives have occurred to me:

• at parks where there are pavilions or covered picnic shelters, work from one of those. During the winter they’re unlikely to be in use and very unlikely to be reserved by a group.
• at parks with no covered areas, put up a tent of some sort and work from that. I bought a Kelty Sideroad, which is a tent-like thing that attaches to the back or side of a vehicle and provides a covered area. I have a nice TravelChair chair and table that would make that fairly pleasant as long as I don’t freeze and it isn’t too windy.

Transmit power

One issue that still has me pondering is transmit power levels. The G90 will do 20W, the KX2 will do 10W.

And I would think the difference between the IC-7300 at 50W and the G90 (~4db) or the KX2 (~7db) should not make much difference in how well I get out - it’s roughly .5 to 1.0 S-units.

And yet when I compare QSO rates between the two, the 50W solution seems dramatically better than the 20W solution. Now, QSO rate isn’t the primary goal for me. That said, however, it’s more fun to get more callers, right up to the point where it starts to become a pileup.

Anyway, that has me pondering radios for picnic table activations not far from the car which could replace the G90 and offer power up to 100W. On the short list are the Yaesu FT-891, Yaesu FT-991, the Yaesu FT-710. It’s occurred to me that the TenTec Eagle is a pretty good candidate and I suppose I ought to put some serious effort into diagnosing the display problem on mine (one digit on the frequency display doesn’t work).

Logging

I used HAMRS pretty successfully for some ten months. My one complaint was that occasionally, on my laptop (a Macbook Air) it would hang in a state where I needed to capture the info for the current QSO, kill it and restart it, and then re-enter the data for the current QSO.

That’s a pretty vexing problem if you’re getting calls at a pretty good pace.

So I tried PoLo, another portable device oriented logger which (because my Macbook Air will run iOS apps) I’ve been using on my laptop.

Bottom line: PoLo is vastly superior, and I’ll be using it going forward.

QSLing

One thing I’m pretty horrid at is sending QSL cards, or even using services like QRZ, eQSL, and LOTW.

I recently had a POTA QSO with Becky, N4BKY as she activated US-0161. The following day, she sent me a nice email, with details of her activation. It was fun seeing photos of the spot she set up and the sunset she witnessed. She included a list of the longest distance contacts she made; I was number four.

Anyway, I really enjoyed that email, and I’ve enjoyed other QSL type emails I’ve gotten from activators. So one obvious thing for me to try is doing similar QSL emails myself.

Writing sending the emails looks like it might be a bunch of work. I’m guessing, though, that although the first one might be a bunch of work, they’ll get easier and easier as I do it more often and refine the process. I’m interested to see how the emails vary from my usual blog post on each activations, and interested to see how the blog reports change as I do the emails.

On top of that I really ought to get current with eQSL and LOTW. Again, that promises to be a bunch of work, as every new park will require defining a new location on LOTW as well as some handwaving on eQSL. I’ve no idea about QRZ.