Rainy Activation at Larrabee State Park

Eager to get my ‘parks activated’ count up to 30 for the next arbitrary award level on the POTA website, I headed up to Larrabee SP, the first state park in the state. It’s about an hour and 50 minute drive for me, one way, from my home - not close but not far, either.

Larrabee SP is a surprisingly large park, nestled up against Puget Sound on the west side, and to the east pretty far up to the ridgeline of the Chuckanut mountains. Naturally, at the west perimeter, it’s essentially at sea level, and it rises very sharply into the Chuckanut mountains. Despite the fact that the area is well known to me (there are trail races on the trails in this area, most notably the Chuckanut 50k), for some reason it didn’t occur to me that if you’re aiming to get good radio propagation, maybe higher on the mountain to the east of the park would be better than down at sea level, where the mountain looms over you to the east, one big RF impervious hunk of Cascade Mountain.

There’s a road (Cleator Road) that on the map looks like it will get you up higher on the mountainside, about 1400 feet ASL, just a hundred feet or so below the top of the ridge. But I didn’t realize that at the time, so I did the activation in the park of the park west of Chuckanut drive, and I paid the price.

That part of the park features a band shell, several picnic shelters, numerous picnic tables, and trailhead for numerous hiking trails, as well as two bathroom blocks.

After a brief drive through the roads in this area of the park, I settled on the north ‘day use shelter’, circled in red on the map above.

This is the shelter I selected, with my car parked proximate to it. The building in the background is the entry/office building for the park, where presumably in busier months you have a chance to buy a Discovery Pass or day use pass. On this particular day, although there were plenty of people using the park, that building was apparently unattended.

Setup

My plan for this activation was to forgo my ‘go to’ Chelegance MC-750, and instead use a Tufteln EFRW with a 41’ radiating element, raised at the non-feedpoint end by a 10m CF telescoping mast. This would have been an ideal opportunity to use the drive-on mast mount under the driver’s side front tire, but I wanted to try a different approach and ended up with the mast held against a vertical post that held a water spigot. The mast was held tightly against the post using two lengths of double sided velcro strap, which it turned out is an easy and quick way to tackle this.

From there, I ran the antenna eastward through a clear space, with the feedpoint held about 1 foot off the ground with a short cord held the antenna in tension and that ran to a handy cobble.

Lesson: putting up the mast and EFRW could benefit from some practice and some experience at choosing the best way to adapt to the site.

You’d think a mast 33’ long, 41’ antenna wire, and various bits and bobs would be obnoxiously visible, but in fact it was surprisingly stealthy.

With the antenna up, I ran the 25’ rg8x feedline from the feedpoint to a picnic table, and set up to work from the picnic table.

CW

I started out on 10m, got nothing, moved to 12m, and again got nothing. Moving to 15m, I got a nice park to park contact with N6VHF, and then more nothing. Once I moved on to 17m I got two more calls, including one from my friend Dan KA7GPP.

When I moved to 20m, the calls started rolling in, and I worked 20m for about 45 minutes, netting 15 more contacts.

That done, I tried 30m (one contact) and then did another stint on 15m (two contacts).

When I tried 10m, I got only one contact in ten minutes, but it was perhaps the star QSO of the day, Gary ZL2IFB, 7136 miles on 10W to get 579 both ways! Poor Gary had to struggle to correct his callsign, which I had correctly logged but then strangely repeated sent ‘ZL3ILB’. Gary, I apologize!

Anyway, with that stellar QSO in the log, and me getting cold and tired, I gave 15m another whirl, got two more contacts, and then packed it all up, hit the head, and headed home.

Assessment

Overall, 24 QSO’s in something over 2 hours, about half the rate of recent activations. Part of that was conditions were lousy due to solar flares, but I suspect the bigger part was that the mountain to the east was reflecting a great deal of my signal out westward, over Puget Sound, the Olympic peninsula, and the Pacific Ocean.

Next time I activate this park, I’ll be looking for a way to set up on top of the mountain instead of at the bottom. And I’ll be looking at topo maps before I visit new parks whenever I can.

Box Score

Total QSOs: 24
Park to Park: 2
Total CW QSOs:24
Time spent operating: 2 hours 6 minutes plus setup, strike, and initial fruitless calling CQ
Solo CW bonus points: 24
Pleasant weather bonus: 0
Favorite Picnic Table points: 0

Things lost: 1 Pilot Razorpoint pen, blue, .5mm
Things broken: 0
Equipment frustration time: 10 minutes
Vital gear not included in loadout: 0

Final Fun-O-Meter^(tm) reading: 9.0