If you’re going to Hamvention, I hope to meet you there. When I’m not floating around, I’ll be hanging out at the Ham Radio Workbench/Halibut Electronics table: 3011.
I’m super excited about attending, but I’ve so much to prepare in advance. Every day between now and then is planned out to the max with family activities and projects.
That, and being an introvert (this might surprise some of you), I have to mentally prepare myself for hanging out with 30+ thousand other human beings. I’ll need ten days for that alone. If I appear tired at Hamvention or FDIM, you’ll know why! Ha ha!
Postcard Field Report
I’ve got a load of videos in the pipeline and to keep from falling behind publishing them, you’re going to see more of my slightly shorter “Postcard Field Reports” for the next couple of weeks during my travels.
These postcard reports contain all of the core information, just less wordy. (In theory!)
Tuttle Educational State Forest (K-4861)
On Wednesday, April 5, 2023, I had a bit of time in the early afternoon to do a POTA activation. Tuttle Educational State Forest was low-hanging fruit as my errands that day took me within a stone’s throw of the park.
I arrived a bit before noon and took some time to record a Hike and Talk video (which will be published in the next couple of weeks).
Monday, April 10, 2023, was a spectacular day weather-wise. Spring was out in all its glory making it impossible to stay indoors.
That day, I was driving back to the QTH and made a little detour to the Clear Creek Access of South Mountains State Park.
According to my calculations, I had about one hour to play radio. I did have a firm deadline to hop off the air because I needed to take my daughter to a tennis lesson that afternoon. Couldn’t be late to that!
South Mountains State Park (K-2753)
As I pulled into the Clear Creek Access parking area, I noticed a family of five grabbing picnic supplies from their car.
For the first time ever, there was going to be competition for the one single picnic table at the Clear Creek access!
Actually, there would be no competition at all because there was no way in the world I’d ever take over the picnic table when a family could use it.
They had a much better reason to use a picnic table than me. Frankly, I was super pleased to see someone else besides a POTA activator using that table. I get a real thrill out of seeing families enjoying our public lands.
Plus, I don’t need a table to play POTA so it was a brilliant excuse to pull the picnic blanket out of the car and set up under a beautiful antenna support…I mean, tree.
For this activation, I decided to use my Penntek TR-45L and, for an antenna, two 28 foot lengths of wire.
As I have written in my activation report for Klínovec, a summit in the Czech Republic, I am trying to activate places outside my home region DM, Germany – Low Mountains in SOTA or DA in POTA. With the May 1st being a public holiday, the long weekend provided a perfect opportunity for an activation a bit further away.
After a while looking around, I chose Brissetish Kopf (FL/VO-126) in France. The summit was close to the German border, hasn’t received much love with only 8 SOTA activations and was also a POTA spot for F-1697 Vosges du Nord Regional Park and WWFF Parc Regional des Vosges du Nord, FFF-0035. That promised enough QSOs for me and provided chances for chasers.
The small cluster to which the arrow points are the Vosges, actually the northern Vosges (Vosges du Nord). The cluster south of it are the higher part of the Vosges. The Vosges are a range of low mountains in Eastern France, which continues as Palatinate Forest on the German side of the border, with the highest summit being 1,424 m / 4,672 ft.
I started my journey quite early, leaving around 8am. During the drive I could not help but had to tease Thomas (K4SWL), who spent quite some time in France and, as far as I know, enjoyed it.
The French region Alsace, through which I had to drive to the Vosges, is quite interesting. The region was disputed over several hundred years between Germany and France and changed back and forth between the two. Many place names are still German, or sometimes a mix of French and German. After the World War II, the region returned to France – hopefully the last change.
I used Google Maps to drive to a parking place close to the summit, but my first attempt ended here:
Not sure why Google meant to show me this – thanks for the 30 minutes detour.
Roughly a half hour later, I arrived at Climbach, the small village next to the summit. Based on findings, the area is populated since the Middle Stone Age, that ranged from 280,000 to 25,000 years ago.
Last year, during a Black Friday sale, I took a calculated risk and purchased a bag I hoped would accommodate my Yaesu FT-817ND that has been outfitted with an Armoloq TPA-817 Pack Frame.
CP Gear Tactical Aircrew/Pubs Bag
Rod (VA3ON) first introduced me to CP Gear Tactical–a military pack manufacturer based in New Brunswick, Canada.
I contacted CP Gear Tactical shortly after outfitting my FT-817 with the TPA-817 pack frame. I measured the frame carefully and asked if the interior padded pocket (which is actually designed to hold a tablet–might fit my radio.
I never heard back from them. I could have called them, but on Black Friday, when it was on sale for 20% off and free shipping, I decided to throw caution to the wind and simply purchase it. My total price in USD was something like $62 shipped.
As soon as I opened the CP Gear pack, the first thing I did was check to see if the FT-817 with pack frame would fit in the interior pocket.
Much to my surprise, it fit it perfectly!
Indeed, it’s as if the pocket were specifically designed to accommodate the FT-817ND/TPA-817 combo.
Even the middle Velcro strap fits precisely in the middle of the radio between the pack frame side extensions. The strap holds the rig securely; once, I accidentally fumbled while holding the bag and even though it was upside down, the FT-817 remained securely inside. The strap held it in place.
The bag has loads of room inside. In fact, you can very easily transform it into a fully self-contained field radio kit.
I actually give a small tour of this pack in my activation video below, so if you’d like to see some of the exterior pockets, I would encourage you to check it out!
I live very close to the Swabian Alb (also known as Swabian Jura or Schwäbische Alb in German). The Swabian Alb is a mountain range in German region Swabia. It ranges from Bavaria in the northeast 200 km / 140 mi to the Swiss border in the southwest.
Thomas Römer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Swabian Alb is a high plateau, which falls slowly to the southeast but with steep cliff-like edges to the northwest. You can follow the northwest edge of the Swabian Alb by looking at the map of the SOTA summits at sotl.as.
The topology limits the possibilities to cross the Swabian Alb, so the course of the routes are more or less unchanged since thousands of years. I live close to an old Roman road. And where an important road was, there isn’t a castle too far away, since the medieval noblemen were quite keen to get its share from passing people and goods.
During the Cold War, important passes received mechanisms to place explosive charges. In case of an advance of the Soviets and its allies, it was planned to blow these roads up, as there was usually no alternative way around.
First Activation: Plettenberg
The Plettenberg (DM/BW-046) is a summit at the edge of the mentioned Swabian Alb, about halfway between Stuttgart and the Swiss border. It’s 1002 m / 3287 ft tall and has a quarry on top.
If you’ve read my “Anatomy of a Field Kit” series, you’ve likely gathered that field kits are a bit of an obsession. [Yeah, understatement alert!]
My field kits roughly fall into two main categories: modular and fully self-contained. My modular kits are ones where components like the battery, antenna, throw line, key, and radio are in separate pouches and can easily be combined to make a complete station before I leave for an activation.
My fully self-contained kits are ones that quite literally have everything needed to perform a park or summit activation in one pouch or box. A good example that I’ve documented here is my MTR-3B field kit.
If you’re a devoted park and/or summit activator, I think it’s important to keep a dedicated kit kit in your car at all times. Why?
It’s ready to grab for impromptu activations
It’s handy in case of road-side emergencies in remote areas
It’s always accessible to demonstrate amateur radio to those who are curious
It’s always always there for those times when you hadn’t planned to play radio, but the opportunity presents itself
I always have a full radio kit in my Subaru and over the years, I’ve changed and adapted it. For the most part, though, it’s been located in the trunk/boot and lives with anything and everything else I keep back there. Sometimes, it’s in the way when we need to fill that trunk space with family items for a trip or when we’re hauling things around town. Other times, it’s floating/sliding around freely in the back.
On long family trips, I’ve been known to store radios under the floor, but it’s a true hassle to remove them because I have to remove anything in the trunk before lifting the floor.
Contraband I hid in the car during our two month Canada trip last year.
I’ve always wanted a way to store my kit in the car in a dedicated space. In the past, I’ve tried to make a kit that could fit under the driver’s seat–thinking that might be ideal–but there’s very little clearance under it and it’s difficult to remove.
Enter the BROG Headrest Pouch Kit
Before I placed my initial order for the Blue Ridge Overland Gear (BROG) Gadget Bag, I checked out other items on their website. One that immediately caught my attention was their Headrest Kit.
It consists of a Velcro panel that fits around a vehicle headrest and a pouch (or pouches) attach to it.
BROG caters to Overlanders and vehicle storage/organization is huge in that community. The headrest kit makes a lot of sense: it’s using space that’s accessible, doesn’t interfere with any passengers, is off the floor, and is otherwise underutilized!
The big questions, of course:
would the pouch offer enough space to store an entire radio kit,
and would the kit weight too much for the Velcro back to hold it in place?
I asked for the Headrest Pouch Kit ($47.99) to be sent with my Gadget Bag order.
BTW: Big thanks to BROG for giving me flexibility with this order. Since I had no experience with their gear, I asked that they send me a list of items and allow me to evaluate them, then pay (full price) for what I decided to keep.
Would it work?
I knew I’d need to store a very small transceiver in this dedicated pack. A few could potentially fit the bill–namely the:
On Tuesday, March 28, 2023, I packed my Elecraft KX3 and took it to the Zebulon Vance Historic Birthplace (K-6856) for a nice, relaxing, early afternoon POTA activation!
It had been a few months since I’d taken the KX3 to the field and it really does deserve some outdoor time because…well…I still think it’s one of the best HF field radios on the market.
I’m spoiled, though, because I also own a KX2 and it does 80% of what the KX3 does, is much smaller, and sports a very long-lasting internal battery. Because of this, my KX2 gets way more field time and the KX3–hooked up to a KXPA100–is my main radio in the shack.
When I make an activation video in the field, I like using a speaker rather than recording from the line out of the radio. Besides the extra post-processing, sometimes the line-out audio from left and right channels are out of phase from each other and end up cancelling each other out in YouTube videos if listening in mono. I recently learned how to fix this, but I find the whole process just adds *that* much more time to post-processing and I’m always pressed for time.
The Elecraft KX3 has a built-in speaker, but it’s pretty anemic. I almost always pair the KX3 with an external speaker to amplify the otherwise excellent KX3 audio for my activation videos.
On this particular day, I had a new speaker to try as well: an Anker Soundcore Mini. I purchased this speaker on the same day I posted Mike’s speaker search and review of the Soundcore Mini. Although I have a Sony SRS-XB12 portable speaker and love it, they’re no longer produced and the battery life isn’t quite as good as the Soundcore Mini (Anker states up to 15 hours per full charge).
This activation would give me an opportunity to really test the Anker Soundcore Mini in the field. In the end, it did a brilliant job.
I should note that I also brought my Blue Ridge Overland Gadget Bag (see above) to the field that day, so I include a little tour and overview of this pack in my activation video.
As I mention in my activation videos, Vance is a small park and, unless you plan to operate from your car, there’s really only one good site to set up: in the picnic shelter. Thing is, if a school, club, or civic group is scheduled to meet that day, the picnic shelter will almost certainly be reserved for them.
Each time I activate Vance, I ask the park staff in advance if the picnic shelter is reserved and if it’s okay if I perform the activation. Fortunately, the shelter is reserved only about 20% of the time. On days when it’s reserved, I simply activate elsewhere.
As I have mentioned in my two previous posts, I have visited my family on the other side of Germany. On the way back, I wanted to make a “tiny detour” and activate a summit in the Czech Republic. I like all kinds of numbers and statistics, and that includes my SOTA stats. My goal is not being number one or be in the top region somewhere, but seeing it progressing and developing satisfies me. Until July last year, the upper right pie chart was only light blue, i.e. I had only activated summits in region DM, Germany – Low Mountains. So I use every chance to push the light blue back.
sotl.as
After some concessions, my family agreed and the way back increased from 6 hours and 583 km / 362 mi to 8:30 hours and 732 km / 455 mi.
Route on Google Maps
On the drive to visit my family, I noticed that I forgot my wallet, so I had neither an ID card nor my driving license. In many regions of the world, it would be probably very difficult to cross an international border two times without papers. However, many countries in Europe have signed the so-called Schengen-Treaty, which led to the creation of Europe’s Schengen Area.
Camoka4, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Schengen Area consists of 27 European countries with a population of over 400 million, who have abolished border checks. However, random inspections still happen. The worst case would be a control in the Czech Republic and the official requirement to go to the German embassy in Prague for new papers.
As expected, the border crossing was easy and it could easily been overseen.
If you missed that sign in the photo, you only note that the town names have changed to Czech, as Czech names are quite different. After the border crossing, the summit is just minutes away, and you can drive up to the very top – pretty convenient for a 10+3 points summit.
Derived from User:Rdc, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The summit Klínovec (OK/KA-001), also known as Keilberg, is the highest mountain in the Ore Mountains, located on the border between the Czech Republic and Germany. With a peak reaching 1,244 me / 4,081 ft above sea level, Klínovec has been a popular destination for outdoor enthusiasts and tourists, and is the most important winter sports area in the region. The mountain has a rich history that includes mining activities for silver, lead, and tin in the dating back to 2500 BC, and it has evolved into a popular skiing and hiking destination in recent years, attracting visitors from both countries. According to reports, the peak has attracted people for hundreds of years, with the earliest observation tower erected in 1817. Continue reading SOTA in the Czech Republic – When everything goes wrong→
The weather on the morning of April 4, 2023, was absolutely outstanding!
I woke up that morning, drank a cup of coffee, looked outside and knew what would be in store the day: a SOTA activation!
My schedule was actually open that fine Tuesday because my daughters were on spring break from school, so the only problem was deciding which summit to activate. A good problem, in other words!
After staring at the SOTL.AS map for a while, I decided to activate Flat Top Mountain (W4C/EM-026) near Blowing Rock, North Carolina. One of the main reasons I chose Flat Top was because the roughly five mile round-trip hike is such a pleasant, casual one. My left ankle was recuperating from a bit of a strain, so I knew Flat Top’s flat, wide carriage trails would fulfill my need for exercise without straining my ankle (which, by the way, is doing much better now).
The drive to Flat Top is a beautiful one–a good third of it is on the Blue Ridge Parkway including the Linn Cove Viaduct which offers up stunning long-range views. I made my way to Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, at BRP milepost 294, where I parked the car and put on my hiking boots.
The park was pretty active for early April, no doubt because the weather was so stunning.
I checked out the beautiful Flat Top Manor to see if renovations had been completed.
It looks very close to completion, I have to assume they’ll be open again soon. The old manor was looking beautiful against clear skies!
Flat Top Manor was built by in 1901 by Moses Cone who was a very successful local textile entrepreneur, conservationist and philanthropist. It’s so fitting that this beautiful bit of architecture and these expansive grounds (which includes no less than two SOTA summits) are now protected by the National Park Service for all to enjoy.
Many thanks to Conrad (N2YCH) who shares the following field report:
“Fly-Away Kit” QRP POTA Activation
by Conrad Trautmann, N2YCH
4/15/2023
The National Association of Broadcasters convention is an annual event that takes place every April at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. This year, I traveled to the show for work and made some time to activate a park and get another state ticked off my “Activated US States” list. I also didn’t want to miss getting the Spring 2023 Support Your Parks Weekend activator award.
A colleague suggested I visit Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, K-7494. The park, which is operated by the US Bureau of Land Management, has a 13 mile scenic drive that has various parking areas you can stop at to get out and explore. Red Rock requires a reservation to visit and costs $20 to enter the scenic drive area. There are places within the park you could activate for free, but I took advantage of my military veteran benefit of free admission and drove the trail and activated at one of the scenic overlooks.
Before I traveled, I had to decide what radio and antenna to bring. I selected the Elecraft KX3 and the AX-1 antenna. Not having to check a bag was key to deciding what to take.
I packed the cables, battery and computer in my brief case and the radio and the AX-1 antenna went into my carry-on bag. I did get pulled out of line by the TSA at JFK airport, but the TSA agent was very nice and just asked a few questions and let me through with no issues.
Before I traveled, I took a look at the park page on the pota.app website and saw that Colin, AK7LV, was the park leader in QSO’s. I looked him up on qrz.com and sent an email asking if he had any good advice for me or could give me some pointers. He responded quickly with suggestions of his favorite locations, how to get to them and even a suggested location where I could pick up a twofer at a trail that crossed through the park. He said I should call him when I get into town. Continue reading N2YCH’s “Fly-Away Kit” QRP POTA Activation→
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Believe it or not, the 2023 Hamvention and Four Days In May is only ten days away at time of posting.
I’ve got a load of videos in the pipeline and to keep from falling behind publishing them, you’re going to see more of my slightly shorter “Postcard Field Reports” for the next couple of weeks during my travels.
