Solo Activating a park is so peaceful…
I have long considered this subject value added, but have never written it down. The peace that comes from setting up a station alone at a park is unmatched.
I think this is why I dont mind setting up at the same park hundreds of times. I will gleefully grab my radio gear and head over to US-2169 and put up my antenna and see what I can find on the radio. This solitude is refreshing from the pressures of life in general. You have no idea how nice it is until you experience it yourself. It is the pinnacle of freedom to me. I can take as long as I want on a particular band. Nobody cares. I am also a Gen Xer as well. Seems the more I hear about this generation of people, I learn that we all like to have our personal alone time. I dont think I know a single person my age that wants to spend every minute possible with other people around.
I do enjoy having friends activate with me on occasion, but I REALLY like to solo activate. ALOT, Today saw me at this very park and I also setup with the intention of doing a “CW only” activation this time as well. Here lately, the sBitx has been “in the shop” with a band noise issue on 20 meters. I think I have gotten somewhere on it but I am waiting on a part to come in before I will know if I am right or not. With it dismantled on the repair bench, there has been no FT8 at the parks. I dont have another radio kitted out for it so I cant do this mode right now.
Instead you see the Ten Tec Scout again. I only chose to run three band modules today as well. You can see in the photo above that I knew I would not use anything other than 15, 17 and 20 meters so I didn’t even bother getting the other modules out of the case. The bands have been in the dumps the last few days due to a huge solar flare and they have not fully recovered as of this activation. I have had so much good luck with 20 and 17 meters that I pretty well know I can land the activation with either one of these two bands only on CW. The 15 meter band is a gamble though, some days it will be open and some days it wont. You might get Finland on one QSO and Colorado on the next on 15 meters as well. With the antennas that I use while activating, this is the norm with this band.
The antenna I used today was the 213” vertical from Wolf River Coils that I picked up at Hamcation. I have not used a hamstick in a good bit lately. While those antennas work really well, I can tune the vertical for all the other bands it will reach that I dont have a hamstick for currently. This opens 12 and 10 meters up for me and that is cool…when those bands are open.
Well, to say it bluntly, 15 meters today was kinda tough. I did make one contact but they were weak and then no one answered me after that. I did check the FT8 portion and there was a good bit of activity, but not much on the CW portion. I have gotten ahead of myself though as this was the last band I tried to work and not the first.
This antenna is quickly becoming one of my all time mobile rig setup favorites. I can deploy it fairly quickly and getting it tuned is also a breeze now that I have figured out how to tune it. I like taking my time and setting up the antenna slowly so that I can inspect the parts for wear or damage and then I will plug the nanoVNA into it and adjust it in three possible areas to get the tune correct for my needs.
I have minimum thresholds for my operations now. I once languished over the lowest possible SWR and as close to 50 ohms of impedance as possible too. This is really overkill though as after doing 294 activations (as of this writing) I have figured out that this is not needed. Just get it close and you are fine is now my mantra. If I see the SWR is 1.4 to 1 or less, I will juice up the radio and see what I can hear. Long gone are the days of squeezing that last ounce of juice out of the setup…unless…
I am alone and I have plenty of time and nowhere to be for the rest of the afternoon. Then I will move the radials around and I will tinker with the length of the vertical and such in an attempt to get that last little bit out of the system. This is one of the joys of activation alone that I find oddly satisfying for some reason.
Today was one of those days where I was good with numbers like you see above. “Close enough” and I am on the air. The bandwidth was plenty wide enough to encompass the entirety of the CW segment too, so once it was tuned, I didn’t bother moving it again. Also, I run the SWR meter on the Scout. I am not looking for readings but more of, just watch for extreme changes to the system. Maybe I didn’t latch the coax connector (BNC has to be twisted to lock them you know, and I have failed to do this step a couple of times for various reasons) or the adapter on the bottom of the antenna mount has worked loose and starts getting intermittent connections. The meter on the Scout will tell this story in real time and I don’t have to dig out the VNA just to check. This antenna is so good with my two 16’ radials (or are they 17’? I cant remember at this point) that as you can see above the 2 to 1 SWR point is past 15mHz! That covers the entire 20 meter band with one tune up and nothing else needed till a band change. This is pretty awesome to be honest. Today I wanted to operate more than I wanted to tinker with the antenna tune, so we called it good and I got the radio powered up.
I forgot my 36Ah battery so I was relegated to operating from the cab of the truck. This is good and bad to be honest… The cab is convenient, but it gets hot in the summer months since it is out in the sun all afternoon usually. I have yet to find shade that will cover the truck cab and allow the antenna to be out in the open away from the trees. This seems easy enough but I assure you it is not. You see I also have to content with people getting tangled up in the antenna and radials and this causes problems as you can imagine. So I back into the spaces that I use to prevent people from walking into the antenna system.
Once the Scout was setup in the seat next to me (another reason to operate alone, you can put stuff literally anywhere you want around you without having to consult with another person at all. I positioned the Begali Traveler and the Picokeyer next to my computer and got started on 20 meters.
I did develop a couple of small pileups today, but only two or three calls at once, nothing like you see some of these people dealing with. It was very manageable today but I did have a near constant string of calls for about an hour, this is nice. It is a good pace but not stressful, you simply finish one QSO and then someone calls you. Rinse and repeat.
While I was at the park today some cool stuff did happen though. This highlights the only thing that could be considered a downside to solo operations. I had no one to share my cool encounters with till you guys read it here. I had a QSO with France. This might not be a big deal to you reading this, but to me setup in a POTA park, anytime I work DX it is cool.
As you can see, 17 meters had some band openings occur and worked several stations on this band with one being the station in France. Below you can see where he re-spotted me and I grabbed that image as well. He was coming in really well for how bad the band was fading in and out. You can see though that he could barely hear my signal, but we made it happen and he is in the log.
Towards the end of the activation, I had another park goer show up and then they saddled up their horse and went for a ride. I am pretty sure this horse doesn’t trust me. She stared at me the whole time they were getting ready for their ride…lol. I did have the door open and my sidetone is kinda loud so the horse could probably hear it and this is probably when it was looking at me for, but you never know…haha.
All in all, I was there almost 2 hours start to finish, got 31 calls in the log and the only other creature to take notice was a horse… I cant ask for a better solo park activation than that. I hope I have shed some light on solo operating for me and what makes me want to do it as well as inspire you to goto a park and make some contacts.
73