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

On Oct 14, I was champing at the bit to do an activation, despite a sort of wet weather forecast. Figuring I’d start figuring out how to work in lousy weather, I ignored the forecast and headed to Lake Sammamish State park.

Setup

I arrived at 10:20 or so to find a fairly sunny, partly cloudy prospect, so I picked this visit as a chance to try a different spot, and headed for a picnic table right on the lakefront itself. What could be nicer than playing radio while gazing over the nice pretty lake? This put me in direct sunlight and I was concerned that it would be hard to read the laptop screen, but as it turns out, I just turned up the screen brightness and had no problems.

I set the MC-750 up on the sand, just a foot or so off the concrete pad that the picnic table was on. Once again, I needed far less then the 50’ of coax; I really should get off the dime and order shorter lengths of armored coax from ABR Industries.

Given the gloomy news from the usual propagation sources (QRZ, solarham.com) I was surprised that when dialing around the 20m band I was hearing stations from all over. I think this was both that general propagation conditions were better than everyone was saying/predicting, and this setup with the quarter wave vertical set up on the damp sand was more effective than the my usual setup.

SSB/FT8

I was intrigued to find I was hearing other stations better than I expected, so I thought I’d explore a bit before settling down to calling CQ. My first call was on 20m to KG7VYS at park US-5841 in Utah. They were 59 to me, and I was 58 to them. (I was running 20W on the Xeigu G90)

The second activator I hunted was AE0ZV, Chane, at US-4410 in Colorado.

At that point I was pretty satisfied that I was getting out just fine, so I settled down to find a clear frequency. After struggling for a while I decided to take the pressure off by banging out a bunch of FT8, and then going back to do SSB and CW.

I struggled to get the digirig setup working with the Macbook for a few minutes before I resolved everything by unplugging the USB-C cable from the Macbook and plugging it back in. Problem solved, I spotted myself and started calling CQ POTA. I still need to figure out how to keep CQ POTA as the CQ message, so I was forced to edit it over and over with each QSO.

One particularly vexing problem I hit was that a number of stations were just responding to CQ over and over, not waiting for my to call CQ. When I’d answer these stations, they would never progress through the sequence, so clearly they couldn’t actually hear me. My conclusion is that they saw the spot on the POTA page, and set about blind calling, hoping I’d respond to them and they could hear me.

This highlights one of the shortcomings of FT8 for POTA - the FT8 window on 20M is so overrun with activity, everyone is stepping on everyone else, and it’s entirely possible that a station calling CQ, which you could hear on a clear frequency, is invisible to you because they are being drowned out by a station operating right on the spot they are. So hunters resort to blind calling, which would be good if I knew they couldn’t hear me and were calling blind, but is bad because I don’t know that, can’t easily work out a frequency to respond on where they could hear me. The result is the activator (me) wastes time trying to respond to these blind callers, and the hunter never gets a contact in their log, either.

But eventually I’d bagged 12 FT8 contacts, and moved to working SSB.

SSB

With all pressure to validate the activation off, I moved to SSB, and after getting shuffled off what seemed like a clear frequency three times, just started hunting other activations.

Over the course of about an hour, I’d hunted parks in NM, NV, AB (two operators), WY, SD, and CA.

CW

At that point, it was 2:30 and Rain Aware was warning me that I’d be getting rain pretty soon, so I put away the G90 and brought out the KX2, which I vastly prefer for CW despite the lower power. I was using the delightful Begali Explorer Dual, mounted directly on the radio.

It was much easier to find a clear frequency for CW on 20m, and in short order I was spotted on pota.app and calling CQ.

My CW skills are improving and I’m starting to catch callsigns with less sending ‘?’, and my sending skills are improving as well.

So I enjoyed four QSO’s on 20m (NV, CO, NV, CA) all in the space of about five minutes, and then the stream of callers dried up. Those four minutes, though, were plenty fun, as I was getting multiple callers on top of one another, all zero beating, and I was still able to make progress on working out callsigns rather than just getting flustered. When the responses on 20m dried up, I moved to 15m, where I got four more contacts in 10 minutes (CO, TN, AZ, CO).

The caller from TN, W4SK, was a particular delight because I heard him send the signal report, 599, and when he sent the state, I didn’t hear “dah, dah dit”, or even “TN”, what I heard was “Tennesee”. I thought that was definite evidence of progress on the CW skills front.

At this point, Rain Aware was warning me that rain would commence any moment, I packed it all up and headed home.

Box Score

Total QSOs: 29
Park to Park: 10
Total FT8 QSOs: 12
Total CW QSOs: 8
Time spent operating: ~2 hours
Solo CW bonus points: 15
Pleasant weather bonus: -10
Nice Activation Spot bonus: +20

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

Final Fun-O-Meter^tm reading: 8.0