Recent Activations

Back again to what is becoming my favorite park to activate: Mima Mounds State Nature Preserve. I came back this time with a much heavier weight tripod to hold up the 25' vertical. I also did a more careful job of only extending the radials to length once I was sure the vertical was extended enough. This seemed to have a great effect on my signal, and I ended up working Italy (IK4IDF) on 15m and Sweden (SM3NRY) on 20m SSB. It's always exciting to be able to work DX from a portable setup, and I appreciate the POTA hunters out there with the impressive stations that help make that possible.

After being the first ever to activate Mima Mounds State Nature Preserve, I wanted to return and retake the top activator spot from KJ7XJ. Mima Mounds is a great and unusual preserve located just south of my home in Olympia, WA. Since it's a fairly sensitive ecological area, I opted to set up a POTA PERFormer-style antenna to keep my impact low (that is: no wires in trees or stakes in the ground). This time I had the IC-706MKIIG and a full 100 watts of power, which turned out to be necessary to use SSB. Some mix of the day's severe solar storm and what might have been a poor antenna setup (too short a vertical and radials that were too long) meant that I struggled to get my 10 QSOs. Fortunately, I was able to chase other POTA and SOTA on 20m and 17m to complete the activation.

Later on during the same trip to California, I took a quick drive over to Cleveland National Forest and activated at the Tenaja Trailhead. Again I had only 5 watts with my IC-705. I still managed to make a few SSB contacts with SOTA operators, and then relied on FT8 to complete the activation. I found a nice piece of exposed rebar on a fence that served as a good anchor for my 17' vertical antenna.

While visiting California for the New Year, I got the chance to activate Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve from the Sylvan Meadows Trailhead. Since I'd flown with a fairly minimal setup, I had only 5 watts with my IC-705 as I'd opted not to bring an external battery on the plane. I ended up working exclusively FT8 on 17m using a 17' vertical and radial field that I attached to the top of our rental car. It worked well enough and my only limiting factor was losing daylight.