Many thanks to Jeff (VE7EFF) who shares the following guest post:

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2.5 km Trek into Wrinkly Face Provincial Park, BC, CA-4307

by Jeff (VE7EFF)

My goal this summer is to do more backpacked-in POTA activations. This is my 3rd POTA outing over the past week.  Being in Canada, I don’t have much time left this season to do this before the weather turns too wet, cold or snowy for my liking.

I attempted to activate Wrinkly Face Provincial Park, CA-4307 last summer.  However, I couldn’t get there because the FSR forestry service road was washed out about halfway to the park.  My Subaru Forester is an amazing SUV on outback FSR roads, but this washout was too much to even attempt.

So, this year I decided to attempt to hike to the park on foot which turned out to be a 2.5 km trek with about 653 ft elevation gain.  As always, my wife Alexis (VE7LXE) is my travel companion.

Our trailhead starts about an hour’s drive north of Kelowna, BC which is where we live.  We park on the side of a gravel road near the trailhead. We will be following a 2.5 km segment of the Okanagan High Rim Trail, which will take us to our destination in the middle of Wrinkly Face Provincial Park.

We aren’t sure exactly where the trail starts from here.  But just around the corner ahead of the car, is an adjoining FSR road. Here we find a sign and map of the Okanagan High Rim Trail (OHRT).

A closer look at the sign shows the OHRT trail starts near the sign.  I have circled our starting point and ending point on the map photo, marked in yellow.  (We ended up setting down about midway in Wrinkly Face Prov. Park.)   So, off we go.

We found the trail!

Apparently, there was a heavy rain downpour early this morning. So, the trail is quite soggy and damp for most of the trek up.  It’s also feeling quite cold this morning.  We actually felt the need to put gloves on.

The beginning of the trail is a steady uphill trod.  However, it also crosses a couple of FSR roads, which gives us some flat areas to walk on.  While most of the trail is well marked with small markers, there were a few areas where we got off track for a short distance and had to backtrack.  There are also free-range cows up here and they tend to create their own network of trails which often crisscross the OHRT trail, which causes periodic confusion as to which one for us to follow.

Thank goodness, I pre-plan these trips on my Garmin GPS and Google Maps to help with navigation.

I don’t think the OHRT trail is very heavily traveled.  In some areas, the pathway is almost overgrown with vegetation.

Along with overgrown vegetation, fallen trees can also create an occasional obstacle.  Often, the trail doesn’t amount to much more than a game trail.

Finally, some open views to the south!  This could be a viable operating area.  One problem though – we haven’t crossed the park boundary yet.  Good news – the sky is starting to clear!  Onwards and upwards…

Making good progress.  We are now crossing into the park boundary.

Welcome to Wrinkly Face Provincial Park, CA-3407.  You won’t find any parking stalls, camp sites, picnic tables, or outhouses here.  But what I do hope to find here is… POTA heaven!

After trekking about halfway into the park, we finally came across an open meadow.  Looks like this could be our POTA ops spot.  In the far distance is a glimpse of Kelowna and part of Lake Okanagan.

It’s nice to finally offload our packs.

Time to start breaking-out my shack-in-the-pack.

My antenna today is an experimental homebrew ½ wave “Vertical Coaxial-Sleeve Dipole”, cut for 20m band.  This is the 1st time I’m deploying this antenna in the field.  I built it the day before specifically for backpack ops.

Typically, I activate with my 20m or 30m center fed dipole, built and sold by N9SAB (excellent portable dipoles).  Dipoles take more time and work to deploy the center feed as well as guying the dipole end wires.  I typically would deploy as a flat dipole or inverted-V.

On the other hand, coaxial sleeve dipoles are typically oriented vertically for omnidirectional propagation.  Today, I’m deploying it as a slightly slanted vertical, perhaps at a 15 or 20 degree angle off vertical center and oriented such that I hopefully maximize propagation to the SE direction, which gives me good coverage of the SE USA from the pacific NW.

While the dipole is physically end-fed, electrically it functions as center-fed dipole, due to the magic of RF skin effect over the first half of the dipole.  I used RG-174 as the medium for the coaxial sleeve dipole. The coax is electrically cut for  ~ ½ wavelength on the 20m band.  The bottom end of the dipole is terminated by a Fair Rite #43 1.4” toroidal core.  This core blocks any RF from traveling back below the toroid towards the transmitter and sets the overall length of the ½ wave dipole above the toroid.  At the apparent center of the RG-174 coax antenna, ¼ wave above the toroid, I separate the shields.  I soldered the upper shield to the coax center conductor to enhance the upper radiator conductor surface area.

The bottom half of the RG-174 coax acts as both a 50-ohm transmission line and as the lower half of a dipole (this results from RF skin effect on the shield outer surface).  For further details, you can Google the topic of coaxial sleeve dipoles.  At the end of the day, we’ll see how it performed…

Time to get the antenna as high as I can into the treetops.

With my trusty Weaver Arborists Throw Bag I have success on the first throw.

I’m guessing that I made it up about 30 ft. or so.

It took a little maneuvering to untangle some of the line from the lower tree branches.

The coaxial sleeve dipole has now been hoisted as high as it can go.  If my support line were up a bit higher, it could operate as a completely vertical dipole.  However, I have it pulled out at about a 30 degree angle towards the SE direction.  This gives me a little higher angle of radiation to the SE, which is what I want. Too low a propagation angle will just be hindered by the nearby mountain tops.

The blue extension transmission line I use to connect to the antenna coax is the equivalent of RG-316.  In this case it is Enviroflex 316, a high quality low-loss small diameter 50 transmission line.  It can be purchased through Digikey.

All the while that I am setting up the antenna system, Alexis is relaxing and enjoying the show.

Time to start calling CQ POTA.  My KX2 power level is set at 8 watts. (Uh-oh, is that QRO?)

This will be my operating position for the next 4.5 hours.

The weather is a mixture of cloud and sun.  When it’s cloudy, it’s cold.  When it’s sunny, it is hot.

As always, I start on 20m and try to bag at least 10 contacts before I move onto 17m and up.

My first 20m contact was made at 17:41 UTC (10:41 PST) with K2UPD in NY.  Not bad for starters.

Over the next 25 minutes I bagged 14 contacts which included NY, CA, NC, NV, TX, CO, MO, OH, and UT.

Then I moved up to 17m.  From 18:37 to 18:45 UTC I bagged 3 more contacts including NM, TX, and CA. Then 17m died (or the 17m hams are taking a siesta).

Next, I move up to 15m.  Only 2 contacts which included TX and LA.

12m and 10m were completely dead.  No action.

Moving back down to 17m.  It has picked up.  Over the next hour, I logged 9 more contacts including TX, FL, CA, OH, ON, MI, and NC.

For my finale, I drop back to 20m and try some P2P contacts.  I picked up 4 P2P contacts including AK, MA, ND, and CA.

After all is said and done, I made a total of 32 contacts over the course of about 4.5 hours.  The coaxial sleeve dipole at least seems to work and get the job done.  How well is hard to say.  But it does function.

I don’t rush through my activations. After all, it’s a lot of work to get up here.  I try to get as much airtime in as I can before the trek back to the car.

All in all, it appears I was able to cover most the USA from coast to coast, including Alaska.  As always, 20m is the bread-and-butter band with 17m and 15m as the gravy bands.

Now it’s time for the trek back to the Subaru Forester.

We hope you enjoyed reading about our POTA backpacked-in activation from Wrinkly Face Provincial Park in southern BC, Canada.

Cheers,

Jeff – VE7EFF and Alexis – VE7LXE

My Equipment List

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• Elecraft KX2
• Elecraft Internal KXAT2 Automatic Antenna Tuner
• Elecraft KXPD2 Paddle
• Homebrew ½ wave “Vertical Coaxial-Sleeve Dipole”
• Weaver 8 oz throw bag
• GM CLIMBING Throw Line 1.7mm, 180 Ft Roll High Strength Arborist Outdoor Utility Cord
• West Coast Paracord Plastic Ladder Winder Cord Storage Organizers (Blue, 20 Pack)
• PARACORD PLANET 95 Type Paracord, Variety of Colors, 100 ft
• 5.11 Rush 72 Tactical backpack, military grade
• Helinox Speed Stools
• Garmin 66sr GPS
• Counter Assault Bear Spray, purchased via Margo Supplies, Canada or USA.
• Bear Spray Hip Holster, Margo Supplies, Canada or USA