POTA Summer 22 Support Your Parks (SYP) Weekend

- July 18, 2022

The activation that very nearly wasn’t!

For SYP Weekend I wanted to do an “All Mode Activation” at K-4423 Spring Creek Forest State Preserve in north east Dallas. I don’t think this is a real thing but I wanted to do it for the challenge. I’ve never done a CW activation and I hadn’t used FT8 much at all in the past 12 months. My plan was to activate a single park with at least 10 contacts on each of the three modes supported by POTA: SSB, CW and and Data (FT8).

You can look at the pictures below, or read on if you’re interested in the details. I used a Yaesu FT-991a, a fully charged 12Ah Bioenno battery. For CW I brought my 3D Printed “CW Morse” single lever paddle wired as a cootie (also referred to as a side swiper).

For FT8, I bought a cheap 11.6” Ebook from Microcenter (Evolve III Maestro). It’s a nice set up, not to slow, and the price includes Windows 10, 4GB Ram and 64 GB storage all for just under $50. I had an old iPhone in the closet from my previous upgrade and inserted the LTE card into the ebook, which worked splendidly.

I spent a few hours doing windows updates, testing from the car and doing dry runs from the back porch the day before my activation. Life is good.

Sunday I get to the park. The temp is 104 degrees. Figured I’ll make this quick. I make my very first CW POTA WX7V EM12 call on FT8 and get a HUGE pileup. Logged the first call. Realized the ebook’s touchpad doesn’t work well when the radio is transmitting. (most likely due to RFI on the USB cable). Added snap on ferrite chokes, reduced the TX power slider in WSJTx. Life is good again.

Get a pop up warning a few minutes later. Seems the sound card driver/com port locked up. I trouble shoot. I inadvertently reboot the ebook. Oops. Windows needs to apply automatic updates (I forgot to pause them). I wait 15 minutes, contemplate going home, but finally after 30 minutes the ebook is updated and I continue.

I didn’t want to “use up all the air conditioning” in my jeep so I open the doors and press on. The next 30 contacts come pretty quickly once I stop trying to “manage” the pileup.

It’s quite stressful to see a full screen of calls and try to work them one by one, first in first out. It’s also hard to keep track of who you’ve worked, who sent 73, why the last person is still calling you etc. I keep checking the logs to make sure I made my 10. I’m surprised when I count 24. I figure I’ll stop at 30.

I settled on letting the machine do the work with the “Call 1st” and “Auto-Seq” set. Even so there was nothing automatic about it. I’d call CQ POTA then lets the first call get answered get another pileup, and press on.

Mind you its been a year or more since I ran FT8 and I had forgotten a lot about running the mode, and moving the TX freq in the water fall when someone comes and parks themselves in the slot you’ve been transmitting. Such is Life.

I then switch to CW. I’ve been learning Morse code for a year, and really enjoy it. 10 contacts on CW come MUCH QUICKER than the first 10 on FT8. But its hot, and I’m out of water and my XYL is due home from the airport by 6pm.

I switch to SSB. Easy work. The SSB contacts come even faster. One P2P activators is getting jammed by QRM or someone tuning up over him but we make it work. I work till I get my 10, apologize to the hunters but its been 3 hours and time to call it a day.

I leave the park elated, and can’t’ stop smiling all the way home because I stuck it out and didn’t give up, in spite of the heat and the computer issues.

I wound up with 51 total contacts: 31 on Digital, 10 on CW and 10 on SSB. What I personally consider a proper “all mode” activation even tho its not really a thing.

What I learned - all radio is real radio. The world if full of eager hams, waiting and willing to make contact regardless of the mode. Ready to test their station and make it better the next time. I also learned that FT8 takes a lot of skill to set up and and keep run properly. We should all have computer skills in our tool boxes.

But I also learned that I really like SSB. And that I absolutely love CW. Do what you enjoy, and enjoy doing it. There’s room on the bands for all of us.

Just look at the QSO map of my contacts at K-4423. Red is CW, Green is SSB and Yellow is FT8.

73 and POTA On!
Chris de WX7V