Sitting here in Rhododendron State Park in Fitzwilliam NH playing POTA. I am on a soft sked with a ham in AZ who is looking for New Hampshire. I’m readily available and always willing to play radio. Plus I was already in the area delivering bread to my sister.

Today I’m using my IC-7300 at 25 watts. My 10A fuses don’t support 50 watts. Ask me how I know…

If you sit in the forest long enough in September, you will get bonked with an acorn.

I’m terribly surprised at the very small difference between running 5 watts and 25 watts. I’m using a delta loop antenna today on 20 and the performance at 25 watts is barely better than 5 watts into a hamstick on my car’s roof. The littlest bit of scrutiny will disabuse anyone of the notion that this is a scientific opinion. But as the Elmers say, “Any antenna is better than no antenna”.

That said, above is the propagation pattern (20 m) over the past 15 minutes. The antenna is very close to the N-S plane.

Sorry I didn’t get this posted sooner. Right before things kicked off I got kind of busy and posting from my phone isn’t that much fun…

I went out on another POTA adventure to round out my goal of 500 contacts a month. This time I trekked out to Prince River Wildlife Management Area in Barre, Massachusetts. The antenna this time was a 53 foot inverted-L design I modified from an idea I found on YouTube.

A commercially-available antenna from Chameleon is a 25 foot telescoping whip that connects to a variety of other stuff they sell for the portable ham radio market. I don’t have any of the Chameleon parts ($$$), but I have a spool of wire($). To an electron, a 25 foot piece of wire looks pretty much like a 25 foot telescoping whip…

The design I ripped off used a 28 foot piece of wire and an alligator clip to extend the whip to 53 feet. I just cut a 53 foot section of wire and put a support loop at 25 feet. The 25 foot section is vertical, and the remaining 53 feet goes out more-or-less horizontally. A number of radials and a 4:1 unun round out the setup. In Barre I was using 15 radials which worked pretty well. The 53 foot length is essentially one of those carefully-selected “random” lengths that, with the 4:1 unun, tunes on multiple bands. I’ve had this antenna “tune” on all bands 6-80, and the contacts were made this day on 10, 15, 20, and 40 meters.

At the site are remains of what must have been a sizeable house. The fireplace is large – I estimate (poorly) that it’s ten or twelve feet on a side, and the hearth looked to be about six feet wide and half that as wide. The foundation was 25 feet or so a side.

One can see that the coverage of the antenna was reasonably good. There were additional contacts in Germany and Spain that didn’t show up in the screenshot.

More information about my POTA operations and antenna “experiments” will be coming up in future editions of the Signal.

73,
John KK1X