Yet another Lake Sammamish Activation (11/25/24)
After our Big Windstorm, I had tried to do an activation of Lake Sammamish State Park and arrived at the park to find, to my horror, all the gates locked. There was so much damage at the park, they’d closed the park while they dealt with the huge amount of tree damage.
So I felt a little anxiety as I headed to Lake Sammamish SP again to try for an activation. Fortunately this time the park was open, albeit with many parking lots closed and full of big piles of slash from all the windthrow trees and broken out branches.
My Usual Spottm was not reachable - the parking area was closed and full of slash. So I headed to a different shelter, next to the playground. It’s nearly identical to the Usual Spot but slightly closer to the parking, so perhaps this will become my New Favorite Spot.
Setup
Following my usual drill, I erected the Chelegance MC-750 some 20’ away from a table at the edge of the covered area of the shelter, used the 25’ coax to reach the table, and set up the radio and laptop on the table.
The difference was that this time, I was planning on doing nothing but CW, so the radio I set up was the KX2, which is much more pleasant to use for CW than the Xeigu G90.
I’m now pretty fast at setting up this configuration, but I wonder if using a telescoping mast and a EFRW or EFHW antenna would be slightly slower to set up but make for faster band changes. I’ve tried an EFRW with a 30 foot telescoping fiberglass mast, and that works pretty well. I now have one of the spiffy carbon fiber POTA Explorer 10m masts, which extends a bit longer, collapses smaller, and weighs quite a bit less. The fiberglass mast when collapsed is still too long to fit into my POTA box or even lay crosswise in the wayback of my car, so it’s pretty inconvenient in a lot of small ways.
SSB & Digital
No SSB nor digital modes this activation.
CW
My plan was to ring the changes starting at 10m and running up to 20m.
Start time was roughly 2045 UTC, or 12:45 pm local time. I’d picked this time deliberately, trying to hit the window of good propagation eastward all the way to the east coast.
As I ran through the bands, I got
10m: 9 QSOs in ~15 minutes
12m: 4 QSOs in ~15 minutes
15m: 5 QSOs in ~10 minutes
17m: 3 QSOs in ~10 minutes
20m: 23 QSOs in ~35 minutes
Total operating time including adjusting antenna for band changes was 1:43. That’s a long time for me to be doing CW, and I was pretty tired at the end and thus was making a lot of keying errors. My experiences with long distance running, though, suggest to me that the only way to get the ability to work CW for a long periods is to repeatedly work CW for long periods. You get better at the stuff you practice, and you have to work on the stuff you suck at, as opposed to just repeatedly practicing the things where you’re actually fairly competent.
Some analysis
This activation I had contacts in CA, CO, CT, GA, ID, IN, KS, ME, MD, MI, MN, MO, NV, NH, NY, NC, OH, OR, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI, AB, BC as well as AK and Japan. 25 states, two Canadian provinces, and Japan is a pretty satisfying haul for me.
It’s worth noting how the signal footprint of pretty much every band I worked is very spread across the US. Propagation in the winter, close to sunset, is not at all like propagation at the height of summer. This is a useful lesson, because knowing what sort of propagation you can expect means your plans for activation will map onto reality more closely.
Finally, I observe that when it comes to pulling in contacts, not all bands are equal. In general I find that although the WARC bands of 17m and 12m offer useful propagation at certain times of day, hunters seem reluctant to hunt on those bands. I suspect this is due to many hams using antennas that don’t give them easy access to 17m and 12m - for instance, a 40m EFHW will give you 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m but not 17m and 12m, so a ham using an EFHW and no tuner will probably not hunt on 17m and 12m.
20m is by far the most popular band for hunters. That’s a useful observation, but it’s not as simple as “just stick to 20m, that’s where the hunters are”. In particular, some hunters are surprisingly quick to pick up on your activation patterns, and if you generally start on 10m and run through the bands up to 20m, they will see you spotted on 10m, contact you, and then watch the spots to see if they can get you on 12m, 15m, 17m, 20m too. That pattern gives them a chance to work more bands at whatever park you’re at, get more contacts with you in the log, and of course it means you get more contacts in your log as well. The more I use this band activation pattern, the more I see hunters get me on more bands, and I’m finding myself sending “GA AGN” pretty often. (It’s a definite help that I’m using POLO for logging and it will point out to me when a caller is already in the log on other bands) I assume these hunters are as aware as I am of the ‘operator to operator’ award for 50 contacts with the same activator/hunter.
One of the nice things about this activation is that it greatly increased my confidence in my ability to pull off an activation using nothing but CW - no SSB, no digital modes. I’m not sure I’ll ever move to doing nothing but CW all the time, but CW offers some pretty compelling advantages for some kinds of activations:
- there’s just a lot less stuff to haul around if you’re doing CW, as you don’t need a mike, earbuds are a good replacement for headphones, and you get a propagation advantage that lets you run less power, so smaller battery, &c. For me, that means it’s easier to activate parks where the best locations mean hauling gear some distance away from the car - many parks have parking lots directly under power lines, for instance, and that makes them hard to work unless you’re willing to walk some distance.
- you can use the RBN for spotting, instead of needing to spot yourself as you move from band to band. This means you can work parks with no cell service much more easily.
- doing CW activations definitely improves both my ability to copy and my ability to send CW. It’s just excellent from a practice point of view.
Box Score
Total QSOs: 44
Park to Park: ?
Total CW QSOs: 44
Time spent operating: ~1.75 hours
Solo CW bonus points: 44
Pleasant weather bonus: 5
Favorite Picnic Table points: 0
Things lost: 0
Things broken: 0
Equipment frustration time: 15 minutes
Vital gear not included in loadout: 0
Final Fun-O-Meter(tm) reading: 9.5
